Abstract:This system report presents our approaches and results for the Chinese Essay Fluency Evaluation (CEFE) task at CCL-2024. For Track 1, we optimized predictions for challenging fine-grained error types using binary classification models and trained coarse-grained models on the Chinese Learner 4W corpus. In Track 2, we enhanced performance by constructing a pseudo-dataset with multiple error types per sentence. For Track 3, where we achieved first place, we generated fluency-rated pseudo-data via back-translation for pre-training and used an NSP-based strategy with Symmetric Cross Entropy loss to capture context and mitigate long dependencies. Our methods effectively address key challenges in Chinese Essay Fluency Evaluation.
Abstract:Chinese sentence simplification faces challenges due to the lack of large-scale labeled parallel corpora and the prevalence of idioms. To address these challenges, we propose Readability-guided Idiom-aware Sentence Simplification (RISS), a novel framework that combines data augmentation techniques with lexcial simplification. RISS introduces two key components: (1) Readability-guided Paraphrase Selection (RPS), a method for mining high-quality sentence pairs, and (2) Idiom-aware Simplification (IAS), a model that enhances the comprehension and simplification of idiomatic expressions. By integrating RPS and IAS using multi-stage and multi-task learning strategies, RISS outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on two Chinese sentence simplification datasets. Furthermore, RISS achieves additional improvements when fine-tuned on a small labeled dataset. Our approach demonstrates the potential for more effective and accessible Chinese text simplification.