  We propose GRS: an unsupervised approach to sentence simplification that
combines text generation and text revision. We start with an iterative
framework in which an input sentence is revised using explicit edit operations,
and add paraphrasing as a new edit operation. This allows us to combine the
advantages of generative and revision-based approaches: paraphrasing captures
complex edit operations, and the use of explicit edit operations in an
iterative manner provides controllability and interpretability. We demonstrate
these advantages of GRS compared to existing methods on the Newsela and ASSET
datasets.
