Resolving Information Asymmetry: A Framework for Reducing Linguistic Complexity Using Denoising Objectives
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Information asymmetry between complex source texts and general-audience comprehension remains a critical challenge in Artificial Intelligence. However, existing supervised simplification methods suffer from the scarcity of parallel training data, while standard text summarization methods often discard essential details to reduce length. Furthermore, zero-shot large language models frequently lack fine-grained controllability over linguistic complexity. To address these technical limitations, we present a framework to resolve information asymmetry by casting text simplification as a controllable denoising language modeling task. Unlike summarization, our approach preserves full semantic coverage while reducing difficulty. Our algorithm targets the problem of identifying and rewriting complex spans without labeled data through three mechanisms: (1) Asymmetry-Aware Masking, which uses model-based reconstruction difficulty (Negative Log-Likelihood) to isolate high-complexity terms; (2) paraphrase context prompting to enforce semantic invariance; and (3) an adaptive decoding strategy that dynamically penalizes complex tokens based on input difficulty. On ASSET (Abstractive Sentence Simplification Evaluation and Tuning dataset), our best setting reaches SARI (System output Against References and against the Input) 42.90 with FKGL (Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level) 7.10 (Sentence Similarity 0.948), and performs consistently on TurkCorpus (SARI 41.10), while requiring no parallel data or fine-tuning.
Source: Symmetry
DOI: 10.3390/sym18020319
Authors: Weidong Gao, Wei He
Institutions: Wuxi University, University of Exeter
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,896
OpenAlex ID: W7128438931