A Comparative Study of Multilingual Fine-tuning and Prompting for Automatic Text Readability Classification in Galician

Sandra Rodríguez Rey, Marcos Garcia


Abstract
Despite advancements in automatic readability assessment, low-resource languages such as Galician remain under-explored. This study addresses this gap by presenting a comparative study of readability assessment techniques in Galician, including fine-tuning of encoder models as well as prompting strategies using large generative models. Due to the scarcity of native Galician resources, neural machine translation was employed to generate synthetic Galician data. The analysis begins with BERT-based monolingual models trained on the synthetic data. For multilingual models, the impact of using original versus translated data was compared in order to assess the effects of translation-based augmentation. Finally, several LLMs were evaluated using zero-shot and few-shot prompting methods. The results indicate that generative models are not yet competitive with encoder models tuned for text classification in Galician, and that data generated through machine translation improves the performance of monolingual models but has little effect on multilingual models.
Anthology ID:
2026.readi-1.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Readability and Text Simplification (READIxTSAR) @ LREC 2026
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Matthew Shardlow, Thomas François, Raquel Amaro, Jorge Baptista, Rémi Cardon, Eugénio Ribeiro, Horacio Saggion, Regina Stodden, Amalia Todirascu, Rodrigo Wilkens
Venues:
READI | TSAR | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
101–120
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-readixtsar-08
DOI:
10.63317/4tnwhe3r9579
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sandra Rodríguez Rey and Marcos Garcia. 2026. A Comparative Study of Multilingual Fine-tuning and Prompting for Automatic Text Readability Classification in Galician. In Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Readability and Text Simplification (READIxTSAR) @ LREC 2026, pages 101–120, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
A Comparative Study of Multilingual Fine-tuning and Prompting for Automatic Text Readability Classification in Galician (Rey & Garcia, READI-TSAR 2026)
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