Elaborative Simplification for German-Language Texts

Freya Hewett, Hadi Asghari, Manfred Stede


Abstract
There are many strategies used to simplify texts. In this paper, we focus specifically on the act of inserting information or elaborative simplification. Adding information is done for various reasons, such as providing definitions for concepts, making relations between concepts more explicit, and providing background information that is a prerequisite for the main content. As all of these reasons have the main goal of ensuring coherence, we first conduct a corpus analysis of simplified German-language texts that have been annotated with Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). We focus specifically on how additional information is incorporated into the RST annotation for a text. We then transfer these insights to automatic simplification using Large Language Models (LLMs), as elaborative simplification is a nuanced task which LLMs still seem to struggle with.
Anthology ID:
2024.sigdial-1.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
September
Year:
2024
Address:
Kyoto, Japan
Editors:
Tatsuya Kawahara, Vera Demberg, Stefan Ultes, Koji Inoue, Shikib Mehri, David Howcroft, Kazunori Komatani
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
29–39
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigdial-1.3
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.sigdial-1.3
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Freya Hewett, Hadi Asghari, and Manfred Stede. 2024. Elaborative Simplification for German-Language Texts. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 29–39, Kyoto, Japan. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Elaborative Simplification for German-Language Texts (Hewett et al., SIGDIAL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigdial-1.3.pdf