Document-Level Text Simplification in Estonian Using Large Language Models

Meeri-Ly Muru, Eduard Barbu


Abstract
Document-level text simplification involves transformations that go beyond sentence-internal edits, addressing discourse coherence, anaphora resolution, and cross-paragraph consistency. Despite advances in sentence-level simplification for high-resource languages, document-level simplification in morphologically rich, low-resource languages such as Estonian remains largely unexplored. This study presents a comprehensive evaluation of five state-of-the-art multilingual large language models (LLMs) for document-level simplification in Estonian. Three prompting strategies are examined: single-pass generation, pipeline-based modular agents, and guideline-augmented pipelines. The evaluation framework integrates automatic metrics assessing readability, semantic preservation, and discourse coherence, alongside a structured manual annotation protocol. The findings indicate that Gemini-2.0 and LLaMA-3.3 produce outputs with near-native fluency and strong meaning preservation, whereas other models display notable grammatical and semantic limitations. This work contributes novel document-level coherence metrics, evidence-based prompting strategies, and publicly available resources for reproducibility.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.573
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
7225–7235
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-573
DOI:
10.63317/3ndqrcjckj32
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Meeri-Ly Muru and Eduard Barbu. 2026. Document-Level Text Simplification in Estonian Using Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 7225–7235, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
Document-Level Text Simplification in Estonian Using Large Language Models (Muru & Barbu, LREC 2026)
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