NLP

Research

ASSET: A Dataset for Tuning and Evaluation of Sentence Simplification Models with Multiple Rewriting Transformations

June 11, 2020

Abstract

In order to simplify a sentence, human editors perform multiple rewriting transformations: they split it into several shorter sentences, paraphrase words (i.e. replacing complex words or phrases by simpler synonyms), reorder components, and/or delete information deemed unnecessary. Despite these varied range of possible text alterations, current models for automatic sentence simplification are evaluated using datasets that are focused on a single transformation, such as lexical paraphrasing or splitting. This makes it impossible to understand the ability of simplification models in more realistic settings. To alleviate this limitation, this paper introduces ASSET, a new dataset for assessing sentence simplification in English. ASSET is a crowdsourced multi-reference corpus where each simplification was produced by executing several rewriting transformations. Through quantitative and qualitative experiments, we show that simplifications in ASSET are better at capturing characteristics of simplicity when compared to other standard evaluation datasets for the task. Furthermore, we motivate the need for developing better methods for automatic evaluation using ASSET, since we show that current popular metrics may not be suitable when multiple simplification transformations are performed.

Download the Paper

AUTHORS

Written by

Fernando Alva-Manchego

Louis Martin

Antoine Bordes

Carolina Scarton

Benoît Sagot

Lucia Specia

Publisher

Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)

Related Publications

May 12, 2026

Human & Machine Intelligence

NeuralSet: A High-Performing Python Package for Neuro-AI

Corentin Bel, Linnea Evanson, Julien Gadonneix, Andrea Santos Revilla, Mingfang (Lucy) Zhang, Julie Bonnaire, Charlotte Caucheteux, Alexandre Défossez, Théo Desbordes, Pablo Diego-Simón, Shubh Khanna, Juliette Millet, Pierre Orhan, Saarang Panchavati, Antoine Ratouchniak, Alexis Thual, Hubert Jacob Banville, Jarod Levy, Jean Remi King, Josephine Raugel, Jérémy Rapin, Katelyn Begany, Marlene Careil, Simon Dahan, Sophia Houhamdi, Stéphane d'Ascoli, Teon Brooks, Yohann Benchetrit

May 12, 2026

March 17, 2026

NLP

Omnilingual MT: Machine Translation for 1,600 Languages

Omnilingual MT Team, Niyati Bafna, Ioannis Tsiamas, Mark Duppenthaler, Albert Ventayol-Boada, Alexandre Mourachko, Andrea Caciolai, Arina Turkatenko, Artyom Kozhevnikov, Belen Alastruey, Charles-Eric Saint-James, Chierh CHENG, Christophe Ropers, Cynthia Gao, David Dale, Edan Toledo, Eduardo Sánchez, Gabriel Mejia Gonzalez, Holger Schwenk, Jean Maillard, Joe Chuang, João Maria Janeiro, Kevin Heffernan, Marta R. Costa-jussa, Mary Williamson, Nate Ekberg, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Pere Lluís Huguet Cabot, Rashel Moritz, Shireen Yates, Surya Parimi

March 17, 2026

March 17, 2026

Speech & Audio

Omnilingual SONAR: Cross-Lingual and Cross-Modal Sentence Embeddings Bridging Massively Multilingual Text and Speech

Omnilingual SONAR Team, Ioannis Tsiamas, Yen Meng, Vivek Iyer, Guillem Ramirez, Jaehyeong Jo, Alexandre Mourachko, Yu-An Chung, Artyom Kozhevnikov, Belen Alastruey, Christophe Ropers, David Dale, Holger Schwenk, João Maria Janeiro, Kevin Heffernan, Loic Barrault, Marta R. Costa-jussa, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Pere Lluís Huguet Cabot

March 17, 2026

February 27, 2026

Human & Machine Intelligence

Unified Vision–Language Modeling via Concept Space Alignment

Yifu Qiu, Holger Schwenk, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne

February 27, 2026

October 31, 2019

NLP

Facebook AI's WAT19 Myanmar-English Translation Task Submission

Peng-Jen Chen, Jiajun Shen, Matt Le, Vishrav Chaudhary, Ahmed El-Kishky, Guillaume Wenzek, Myle Ott, Marc’Aurelio Ranzato

October 31, 2019

March 14, 2019

NLP

On the Pitfalls of Measuring Emergent Communication | Facebook AI Research

Ryan Lowe, Jakob Foerster, Y-Lan Boureau, Joelle Pineau, Yann Dauphin

March 14, 2019

January 13, 2020

NLP

Scaling up online speech recognition using ConvNets | Facebook AI Research

Vineel Pratap, Qiantong Xu, Jacob Kahn, Gilad Avidov, Tatiana Likhomanenko, Awni Hannun, Vitaliy Liptchinsky, Gabriel Synnaeve, Ronan Collobert

January 13, 2020

April 30, 2018

NLP

Computer Vision

Mastering the Dungeon: Grounded Language Learning by Mechanical Turker Descent | Facebook AI Research

Zhilin Yang, Saizheng Zhang, Jack Urbanek, Will Feng, Alexander H. Miller, Arthur Szlam, Douwe Kiela, Jason Weston

April 30, 2018

Help Us Pioneer The Future of AI

We share our open source frameworks, tools, libraries, and models for everything from research exploration to large-scale production deployment.