A Dynamic Multi-criteria Multi-engine Approach for Text Simplification

Abstract

In this work we present a multi-criteria multi-engine approach for text simplification. The main goal is to demonstrate a way to take advantage of a pool of systems, since in the literature several systems have been proposed for the task, and the results have been improving considerably. Note though, that such systems can behave differently, better or worse than the other ones, according to the input. For this reason, in this work we investigate the benefits of exploiting multiple systems at once, in a single-engine, in order to select the most appropriate simplification output from a pool of candidate outputs. In such an engine, a multi-critera decision making approach selects the final output considering simplicity and similarity scores, by comparing the candidates with the input. Results on both the Turk and WikiSmall corpora indicate that the proposed framework is able to balance the trade-off between bilingual evaluation understudy (BLEU), system output against references and against the input sentence (SARI), and Flesch reading ease scores for existing state-of-the art models.