AUTHOR=Ebling Sarah , Battisti Alessia , Kostrzewa Marek , Pfütze Dominik , Rios Annette , Säuberli Andreas , Spring Nicolas TITLE=Automatic Text Simplification for German JOURNAL=Frontiers in Communication VOLUME=7 YEAR=2022 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/communication/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2022.706718 DOI=10.3389/fcomm.2022.706718 ISSN=2297-900X ABSTRACT=

The article at hand aggregates the work of our group in automatic processing of simplified German. We present four parallel (standard/simplified German) corpora compiled and curated by our group. We report on the creation of a gold standard of sentence alignments from the four sources for evaluating automatic alignment methods on this gold standard. We show that one of the alignment methods performs best on the majority of the data sources. We used two of our corpora as a basis for the first sentence-based neural machine translation (NMT) approach toward automatic simplification of German. In follow-up work, we extended our model to render it capable of explicitly operating on multiple levels of simplified German. We show that using source-side language level labels improves performance with regard to two evaluation metrics commonly applied to measuring the quality of automatic text simplification.