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.

We present a corpus of parallel German-language simplified newspaper articles. The articles have been aligned at sentence level and annotated according to the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) framework. These RST annotated texts could shed light on structural aspects of text complexity and how simplifications work on a text-level.

In this paper we explain HIIG’s contribution to the shared task Text Complexity DE Challenge 2022. Our best-performing model for the task of automatically determining the complexity level of a German-language sentence is a combination of a transformer model and a classic feature-based model, which achieves a mapped root square mean error of 0.446 on the test data.

We examine the link between facets of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) and the selection of content for extractive summarisation, for German-language texts. For this purpose, we produce a set of extractive summaries for a dataset of German-language newspaper commentaries, a corpus which already has several layers of annotation. We provide an in-depth analysis of the connection between summary sentences and several RST-based features and transfer these insights to various automated summarisation models. Our results show that RST features are informative for the task of extractive summarisation, particularly nuclearity and relations at sentence-level.

Research on argumentation mining from text has frequently discussed relationships to discourse parsing, but few empirical results are available so far. One corpus that has been annotated in parallel for argumentation structure and for discourse structure (RST, SDRT) are the ‘argumentative microtexts’ (Peldszus and Stede, 2016a). While results on perusing the gold RST annotations for predicting argumentation have been published (Peldszus and Stede, 2016b), the step to automatic discourse parsing has not yet been taken. In this paper, we run various discourse parsers (RST, PDTB) on the corpus, compare their results to the gold annotations (for RST) and then assess the contribution of automatically-derived discourse features for argumentation parsing. After reproducing the state-of-the-art Evidence Graph model from Afantenos et al. (2018) for the microtexts, we find that PDTB features can indeed improve its performance.