Transforming Complex Sentences into a Semantic Hierarchy

Item Type Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Abstract We present an approach for recursively splitting and rephrasing complex English sentences into a novel semantic hierarchy of simplified sentences, with each of them presenting a more regular structure that may facilitate a wide variety of artificial intelligence tasks, such as machine translation (MT) or information extraction (IE). Using a set of hand-crafted transformation rules, input sentences are recursively transformed into a two-layered hierarchical representation in the form of core sentences and accompanying contexts that are linked via rhetorical relations. In this way, the semantic relationship of the decomposed constituents is preserved in the output, maintaining its interpretability for downstream applications. Both a thorough manual analysis and automatic evaluation across three datasets from two different domains demonstrate that the proposed syntactic simplification approach outperforms the state of the art in structural text simplification. Moreover, an extrinsic evaluation shows that when applying our framework as a preprocessing step the performance of state-of-the-art Open IE systems can be improved by up to 346% in precision and 52% in recall. To enable reproducible research, all code is provided online.
Authors Niklaus, Christina; Cetto, Matthias; Freitas, André & Handschuh, Siegfried
Language English
Subjects computer science
HSG Classification contribution to scientific community
Date July 2019
Publisher Association for Computational Linguistics
Place of Publication Florence, Italy
Page Range 3415-3427
Title of Book Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Event Title 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Event Location Florence, Italy
Event Dates 28.07.2019 - 02.08.2019
Publisher DOI https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/P19-1333
Official URL https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P19-1333.pdf
Depositing User Dr. Christina Niklaus
Date Deposited 04 Oct 2019 12:28
Last Modified 20 Jul 2022 17:39
URI: https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/publications/258033

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Niklaus, Christina; Cetto, Matthias; Freitas, André & Handschuh, Siegfried: Transforming Complex Sentences into a Semantic Hierarchy. 2019. - 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). - Florence, Italy.

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https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/id/eprint/258033
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