Multitask Models for Controlling the Complexity of Neural Machine Translation

Abstract

We introduce a machine translation task where the output is aimed at audiences of different levels of target language proficiency. We collect a novel dataset of news articles available in English and Spanish and written for diverse reading grade levels. We leverage this dataset to train multitask sequence to sequence models that translate Spanish into English targeted at an easier reading grade level than the original Spanish. We show that multitask models outperform pipeline approaches that translate and simplify text independently.

Tasks

Reproductions