Aligning Sentences from Standard Wikipedia to Simple Wikipedia

This work improves monolingual sentence alignment for text simplification, specifically for text in standard and simple Wikipedia. We introduce a method that improves over past efforts by using a greedy (vs. ordered) search over the document and a word-level semantic similarity score based on Wiktionary (vs. WordNet) that also accounts for structural similarity through syntactic dependencies. Experiments show improved performance on a hand-aligned set, with the largest gain coming from structural similarity. Resulting datasets of manually and automatically aligned sentence pairs are made available.