  Sentence Split and Rephrase aims to break down a complex sentence into
several simple sentences with its meaning preserved. Previous studies tend to
address the issue by seq2seq learning from parallel sentence pairs, which takes
a complex sentence as input and sequentially generates a series of simple
sentences. However, the conventional seq2seq learning has two limitations for
this task: (1) it does not take into account the facts stated in the long
sentence; As a result, the generated simple sentences may miss or inaccurately
state the facts in the original sentence. (2) The order variance of the simple
sentences to be generated may confuse the seq2seq model during training because
the simple sentences derived from the long source sentence could be in any
order.
  To overcome the challenges, we first propose the Fact-aware Sentence
Encoding, which enables the model to learn facts from the long sentence and
thus improves the precision of sentence split; then we introduce Permutation
Invariant Training to alleviate the effects of order variance in seq2seq
learning for this task. Experiments on the WebSplit-v1.0 benchmark dataset show
that our approaches can largely improve the performance over the previous
seq2seq learning approaches. Moreover, an extrinsic evaluation on oie-benchmark
verifies the effectiveness of our approaches by an observation that splitting
long sentences with our state-of-the-art model as preprocessing is helpful for
improving OpenIE performance.

Computation and Language