Automatic Generation of Graded Texts in Old Church Slavonic

Iglika Nikolova-Stoupak, Gaël Lejeune, Aliona Shestakova-Stukun, Eva Schaeffer-Lacroix


Abstract
In the past few decades, graded readers have been valued within language education and have so much as extended onto the so-called classical (or ‘dead’) languages, such as Latin and Greek. The immersive reading and listening of adapted texts in these languages has been shown to increase students’ proficiency, independence and motivation. However, as of now there is only a small number of related resources as well as of classical languages represented. The present study will investigate the current potential for (semi-)automatic generation of adapted classical-language readers while focusing on the Old Church Slavonic language. From a Natural Language Processing (NLP) point of view, work with the language is challenging due to the variety of dialects and diachronic variations it encompasses. The following steps are taken within our study: 1) Representative measurable characteristics of professional classical-language readers, such as the Latin Lingua latina per se illustrata and the Greek Athenaze, are analysed. 2) Automatic generation of adapted Old Church Slavonic text is attempted through the use of a sequence-to-sequence model (mT5) as well as a Large Language Model (GPT-5) in a one-shot setting. 3) The derived texts’ quality is assessed through both human evaluation and a comparison of their textual characteristics with those of professional texts as defined in point 1). The edited versions of the GPT-based texts are shared for future reference and use.
Anthology ID:
2026.determit-1.6
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Evaluating Text Difficulty in a Multilingual Context (DeTermIt! 2026)
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio, Federica Vezzani, Liana Ermakova, Hosein Azarbonyad, Jaap Kamps
Venues:
DeTermIt | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
51–62
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-determit-06
DOI:
10.63317/3mgy6qi4bkoq
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Iglika Nikolova-Stoupak, Gaël Lejeune, Aliona Shestakova-Stukun, and Eva Schaeffer-Lacroix. 2026. Automatic Generation of Graded Texts in Old Church Slavonic. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Evaluating Text Difficulty in a Multilingual Context (DeTermIt! 2026), pages 51–62, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Automatic Generation of Graded Texts in Old Church Slavonic (Nikolova-Stoupak et al., DeTermIt 2026)
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