Edit Policy-Aligned Text Simplification

Xuanxin Wu, Yuki Arase, Masaaki Nagata


Abstract
Text simplification aims to modify documents and sentences to make them easier to read and understand while preserving their meanings. Different applications require distinct simplification policies, e.g., lexical-oriented simplification and overall rewriting while trading off detail for simplicity. However, achieving such policy-driven control remains an open challenge. In this work, we introduce a simple yet powerful approach that leverages Large Language Model-as-a-Judge (LLM-Judge) to automatically construct policy-aligned training data, removing the need for costly human annotation or parallel corpora. Our method enables the construction of simplification models that adapt to diverse simplification policies at both the sentence and document levels. Remarkably, small-scale open-source LLMs match or surpass GPT-5, as verified by both automatic metrics and edit analysis. The consistent improvements across model families and sizes demonstrate the robustness of our approach.
Anthology ID:
2026.aacl-long.150
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
November
Year:
2026
Address:
Hengqin, China
Editors:
Yue Zhang, Ruifeng Xu, Ayu Purwarianti, Tong Rong, Jun Suzuki
Venues:
AACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3296–3330
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-long.150/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xuanxin Wu, Yuki Arase, and Masaaki Nagata. 2026. Edit Policy-Aligned Text Simplification. In Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3296–3330, Hengqin, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Edit Policy-Aligned Text Simplification (Wu et al., AACL-IJCNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-long.150.pdf