MUSS: Multilingual Unsupervised Sentence Simplification by Mining Paraphrases

Understand

Progress in sentence simplification has been hindered by a lack of labeled parallel simplification data, particularly in languages other than English.

• We introduce MUSS, a Multilingual Unsupervised Sentence Simplification system that does not require labeled simplification data.
• MUSS uses a novel approach to sentence simplification that trains strong models using sentence-level paraphrase data instead of proper simplification data.
• These models leverage unsupervised pretraining and controllable generation mechanisms to flexibly adjust attributes such as length and lexical complexity at inference time.