# The Fewer Splits are Better: Deconstructing Readability in Sentence Splitting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.00937 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00937/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Practical Bayesian model evaluation using leave-one-out cross-validation and WAIC](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.04544/) (2015)
- [Sentence Simplification with Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10931/) (2017)
- [BLEU is Not Suitable for the Evaluation of Text Simplification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05995/) (2018)
- [Learning To Split and Rephrase From Wikipedia Edit History](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09468/) (2018)
- [Semantic Structural Evaluation for Text Simplification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05022/) (2018)
- [Split and Rephrase](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06971/) (2017)
- [BiSECT: Learning to Split and Rephrase Sentences with Bitexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05006/) (2021)
- [FastKASSIM: A Fast Tree Kernel-Based Syntactic Similarity Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08299/) (2022)
- [MinWikiSplit: A Sentence Splitting Corpus with Minimal Propositions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12131/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [From Lengthy to Lucid: A Systematic Literature Review on NLP Techniques for Taming Long Sentences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05172/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we focus on sentence splitting, a subfield of text simplification, motivated largely by an unproven idea that if you divide a sentence in pieces, it should become easier to understand. Our primary goal in this paper is to find out whether this is true. In particular, we ask, does it matter whether we break a sentence into two or three? We report on our findings based on Amazon Mechanical Turk. More specifically, we introduce a Bayesian modeling framework to further investigate to what degree a particular way of splitting the complex sentence affects readability, along with a number of other parameters adopted from diverse perspectives, including clinical linguistics, and cognitive linguistics. The Bayesian modeling experiment provides clear evidence that bisecting the sentence leads to enhanced readability to a degree greater than what we create by trisection.