Enhancing Sentence Simplification in Portuguese: Leveraging Paraphrases, Context, and Linguistic Features

Abstract

Automatic text simplification focuses on transforming texts into a more comprehensible version without sacrificing their precision. However, automatic methods usually require (paired) datasets that can be rather scarce in languages other than English. This paper presents a new approach to automatic sentence simplification that leverages paraphrases, context, and linguistic attributes to overcome the absence of paired texts in Portuguese.We frame the simplification problem as a textual style transfer task and learn a style representation using the sentences around the target sentence in the document and its linguistic attributes. Moreover, unlike most unsupervised approaches that require style-labeled training data, we fine-tune strong pre-trained models using sentence-level paraphrases instead of annotated data. Our experiments show that our model achieves remarkable results, surpassing the current state-of-the-art (BART+ACCESS) while competitively matching a Large Language Model.