Dephrasing

Dephrasing is a term used in linguistics and natural language processing to describe the process of transforming a sentence into a clearer, more concise form by removing extraneous or non-essential phrases while preserving core meaning. It is related to paraphrase, text simplification, and content pruning, but focuses specifically on reducing phrase-level complexity rather than changing the core proposition.

Approaches to dephrasing vary. They can be rule-based, identifying non-essential elements such as redundant relative clauses, appositives, or discourse markers and deleting or rewriting them. Data-driven methods use statistical or neural models trained to produce shorter, preservation-maintaining outputs. In practice, dephrasing can combine deletion with rewording to maintain grammaticality and coherence. Evaluation typically considers semantic fidelity, readability, and fluency, using metrics like human judgments and, in some cases, automatic measures such as BLEU, ROUGE, or more recent semantic similarity scores.

Examples illustrate the idea. The sentence “The man, who was wearing a red hat, walked quickly down the street” can be dephrased to “The man wearing a red hat walked quickly down the street.” Another common case is removing hedges or filler language: “I think that this is, in my opinion, a good idea” might become “I think this is a good idea.”

Applications include editing and drafting aid, text summarization, accessibility for clearer communication, and preparation of content for speech synthesis where conciseness improves intelligibility. Challenges involve preserving essential information, maintaining nuance, and handling cross-sentence coherence. There is no single formal definition, and the term is used variably across studies.