Title: Split and Rephrase,
Abstract: We propose a new sentence simplification task (Split-and-Rephrase) where the
aim is to split a complex sentence into a meaning preserving sequence of
shorter sentences. Like sentence simplification, splitting-and-rephrasing has
the potential of benefiting both natural language processing and societal
applications. Because shorter sentences are generally better processed by NLP
systems, it could be used as a preprocessing step which facilitates and
improves the performance of parsers, semantic role labellers and machine
translation systems. It should also be of use for people with reading
disabilities because it allows the conversion of longer sentences into shorter
ones. This paper makes two contributions towards this new task. First, we
create and make available a benchmark consisting of 1,066,115 tuples mapping a
single complex sentence to a sequence of sentences expressing the same meaning.
Second, we propose five models (vanilla sequence-to-sequence to
semantically-motivated models) to understand the difficulty of the proposed
task.