---
title: "Decontextualization: Making Sentences Stand-Alone (2021)"
description: "Using this data, they build a coreference-based system and a sequence-to-sequence generator. 26 references, cited by 79 papers here."
authors: ["Eunsol Choi", "Jennimaria Palomaki", "Matthew Lamm", "Tom Kwiatkowski", "Dipanjan Das", "Michael Collins"]
year: 2021
venue: "Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/2021.tacl-1.27/"
doi: "10.1162/tacl_a_00377"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/choi-2021-decontextualization-making-sentences-stand-alone/"
---
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# Decontextualization: Making Sentences Stand-Alone

**Authors:** [Eunsol Choi](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/eunsol-choi/), [Jennimaria Palomaki](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/jennimaria-palomaki/), [Matthew Lamm](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/matthew-lamm/), [Tom Kwiatkowski](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/tom-kwiatkowski/), [Dipanjan Das](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/dipanjan-das/) and [Michael Collins](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/michael-collins/) · **Year:** 2021 · **Venue:** [Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/tacl/) ([Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL) 2021](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/tacl/2021/)) · **Publisher:** [The MIT Press](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/the-mit-press/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2021.tacl-1.27/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2021.tacl-1.27.pdf) · [DOI 10.1162/tacl\_a\_00377](https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00377) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W3128754101)

**Citations:** 54 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [79](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/choi-2021-decontextualization-making-sentences-stand-alone/cited-by/) in our library, of the 141,840 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
NLP systems such as summarizers, QA models and retrievers often lift single sentences out of documents, yet these excerpts frequently rely on surrounding text for references and scope. The authors formalize sentence decontextualization: rewriting a sentence, given its preceding context, so it is understandable alone while keeping its truth-conditional meaning (explicature). Implicatures need not survive. They turn this into a crowdsourcing protocol on English Wikipedia. Annotators label a sentence FEASIBLE or INFEASIBLE and then make small edits: swapping pronouns, completing names, dropping discourse markers, and adding bridging or scoping phrases. Using this data, they build a coreference-based system and a sequence-to-sequence generator. The largest generator produces good rewrites in most cases but still trails humans in thoroughness and accuracy. Pilot studies show that users value decontextualized answers as concise yet informative, and that indexing decontextualized sentences makes open-domain QA retrieval much cheaper. The task is a reusable building block for pipelines handling text outside its original context.

## Key points
- **Definition:** A rewrite s′ is valid if it is interpretable in an empty context and has the same truth-conditional meaning as the original sentence in its context. Extra-linguistic context (time, place, audience) is assumed unchanged, so expressions like "thus far" stay as they are.
- **Edit frequencies:** A manual analysis of 200 examples counted the main edit types:
  - PRONOUN/NP SWAP: 40.5%
  - NAME COMPLETION: 11.5%
  - DM REMOVAL: 3.5%
  - Other types: BRIDGING, GLOBAL SCOPING and ADDITION
- **Models and evaluation:** One model builds on the coreference model of Joshi et al. (2020), the other on the generation model of Raffel et al. (2019a). Outputs are scored with automatic metrics derived from Xu et al. (2016) and with human evaluation.
- **Retrieval result (NQ-open):** Sentence-level indexing beats paragraph and 100-word segmentation on cost-effectiveness. Decontextualized sentences approach the recall of 100-word windows at about 1/10th of the computational cost.
- **Resource:** The dataset and evaluation script are released at github.com/google-research/language (`language/decontext`). The current scope is English encyclopedic text rewritten for an empty context.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

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## Cite

Cite as: Eunsol Choi, Jennimaria Palomaki, Matthew Lamm, Tom Kwiatkowski, Dipanjan Das and Michael Collins. 2021. Decontextualization: Making Sentences Stand-Alone. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@article{choi2021decontextualization,
  title = {{Decontextualization: Making Sentences Stand-Alone}},
  author = {Eunsol Choi, Jennimaria Palomaki, Matthew Lamm, Tom Kwiatkowski, Dipanjan Das and Michael Collins},
  journal = {Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.1162/tacl\_a\_00377},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00377}
}
```

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*Updated 24 October 2026*