Controllable Sentence Simplification in Swedish Using Control Prefixes and Mined Paraphrases

Abstract

Making information accessible to diverse target audiences, including individuals with dyslexia and cognitive disabilities, is crucial. Automatic Text Simplification (ATS) systems aim to facilitate readability and comprehension by reducing linguistic complexity. However, they often lack customizability to specific user needs, and training data for smaller languages can be scarce. This paper addresses ATS in a Swedish context, using methods that provide more control over the simplification. A dataset of Swedish paraphrases is mined from large amounts of text and used to train ATS models utilizing prefix-tuning with control prefixes. We also introduce a novel data-driven method for selecting complexity attributes for controlling the simplification and compare it with previous approaches. Evaluation of the trained models using SARI and BLEU demonstrates significant improvements over the baseline — a fine-tuned Swedish BART model — and compared to previous Swedish ATS results. These findings highlight the effectiveness of employing paraphrase data in conjunction with controllable generation mechanisms for simplification. Additionally, the set of explored attributes yields similar results compared to previously used attributes, indicating their ability to capture important simplification aspects.