Aligning Sentence Simplification with ESL Learner's Proficiency for Language Acquisition

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Li, Guanlin, Arase, Yuki, Crespi, Noel
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Li, Guanlin
Arase, Yuki
Crespi, Noel
author_facet Li, Guanlin
Arase, Yuki
Crespi, Noel
contents Text simplification is crucial for improving accessibility and comprehension for English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. This study goes a step further and aims to facilitate ESL learners' language acquisition by simplification. Specifically, we propose simplifying complex sentences to appropriate levels for learners while also increasing vocabulary coverage of the target level in the simplifications. We achieve this without a parallel corpus by conducting reinforcement learning on a large language model. Our method employs token-level and sentence-level rewards, and iteratively trains the model on its self-generated outputs to guide the model to search for simplification hypotheses that satisfy the target attributes. Experiment results on CEFR-SP and TurkCorpus datasets show that the proposed method can effectively increase the frequency and diversity of vocabulary of the target level by more than $20\%$ compared to baseline models, while maintaining high simplification quality.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_11457
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Aligning Sentence Simplification with ESL Learner's Proficiency for Language Acquisition
Li, Guanlin
Arase, Yuki
Crespi, Noel
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Text simplification is crucial for improving accessibility and comprehension for English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. This study goes a step further and aims to facilitate ESL learners' language acquisition by simplification. Specifically, we propose simplifying complex sentences to appropriate levels for learners while also increasing vocabulary coverage of the target level in the simplifications. We achieve this without a parallel corpus by conducting reinforcement learning on a large language model. Our method employs token-level and sentence-level rewards, and iteratively trains the model on its self-generated outputs to guide the model to search for simplification hypotheses that satisfy the target attributes. Experiment results on CEFR-SP and TurkCorpus datasets show that the proposed method can effectively increase the frequency and diversity of vocabulary of the target level by more than $20\%$ compared to baseline models, while maintaining high simplification quality.
title Aligning Sentence Simplification with ESL Learner's Proficiency for Language Acquisition
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11457