Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Kamana, Lineesha, Subramanian, Akshita Ananda, Ghosh, Mehuli, Saha, Suman
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00506
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911350502981632
author Kamana, Lineesha
Subramanian, Akshita Ananda
Ghosh, Mehuli
Saha, Suman
author_facet Kamana, Lineesha
Subramanian, Akshita Ananda
Ghosh, Mehuli
Saha, Suman
contents Natural language often combines multiple ideas into complex sentences. Atomic sentence extraction, the task of decomposing complex sentences into simpler sentences that each express a single idea, improves performance in information retrieval, question answering, and automated reasoning systems. Previous work has formalized the "split-and-rephrase" task and established evaluation metrics, and machine learning approaches using large language models have improved extraction accuracy. However, these methods lack interpretability and provide limited insight into which linguistic structures cause extraction failures. Although some studies have explored dependency-based extraction of subject-verb-object triples and clauses, no principled analysis has examined which specific clause structures and dependencies lead to extraction difficulties. This study addresses this gap by analyzing how complex sentence structures, including relative clauses, adverbial clauses, coordination patterns, and passive constructions, affect the performance of rule-based atomic sentence extraction. Using the WikiSplit dataset, we implemented dependency-based extraction rules in spaCy, generated 100 gold=standard atomic sentence sets, and evaluated performance using ROUGE and BERTScore. The system achieved ROUGE-1 F1 = 0.6714, ROUGE-2 F1 = 0.478, ROUGE-L F1 = 0.650, and BERTScore F1 = 0.5898, indicating moderate-to-high lexical, structural, and semantic alignment. Challenging structures included relative clauses, appositions, coordinated predicates, adverbial clauses, and passive constructions. Overall, rule-based extraction is reasonably accurate but sensitive to syntactic complexity.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_00506
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Rule-Based Approaches to Atomic Sentence Extraction
Kamana, Lineesha
Subramanian, Akshita Ananda
Ghosh, Mehuli
Saha, Suman
Computation and Language
Natural language often combines multiple ideas into complex sentences. Atomic sentence extraction, the task of decomposing complex sentences into simpler sentences that each express a single idea, improves performance in information retrieval, question answering, and automated reasoning systems. Previous work has formalized the "split-and-rephrase" task and established evaluation metrics, and machine learning approaches using large language models have improved extraction accuracy. However, these methods lack interpretability and provide limited insight into which linguistic structures cause extraction failures. Although some studies have explored dependency-based extraction of subject-verb-object triples and clauses, no principled analysis has examined which specific clause structures and dependencies lead to extraction difficulties. This study addresses this gap by analyzing how complex sentence structures, including relative clauses, adverbial clauses, coordination patterns, and passive constructions, affect the performance of rule-based atomic sentence extraction. Using the WikiSplit dataset, we implemented dependency-based extraction rules in spaCy, generated 100 gold=standard atomic sentence sets, and evaluated performance using ROUGE and BERTScore. The system achieved ROUGE-1 F1 = 0.6714, ROUGE-2 F1 = 0.478, ROUGE-L F1 = 0.650, and BERTScore F1 = 0.5898, indicating moderate-to-high lexical, structural, and semantic alignment. Challenging structures included relative clauses, appositions, coordinated predicates, adverbial clauses, and passive constructions. Overall, rule-based extraction is reasonably accurate but sensitive to syntactic complexity.
title Rule-Based Approaches to Atomic Sentence Extraction
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00506