Text simplification aims to make the text easier to understand by applying rewriting transformations. There has been very little research on Chinese text simplification for a long time. The lack of generic evaluation data is an essential reason for this phenomenon. In this paper, we introduce MCTS, a multi-reference Chinese text simplification dataset. We describe the annotation process of the dataset and provide a detailed analysis. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance of several unsupervised methods and advanced large language models. We additionally provide Chinese text simplification parallel data that can be used for training, acquired by utilizing machine translation and English text simplification. We hope to build a basic understanding of Chinese text simplification through the foundational work and provide references for future research. All of the code and data are released at https://github.com/blcuicall/mcts/.

“Language teachers spend a lot of time developing good examples for language learners. For this reason, we define a new task for language learning, lexical complexity controlledsentence generation, which requires precise control over the lexical complexity in thekeywords to examples generation and better fluency and semantic consistency. The chal-lenge of this task is to generate fluent sentences only using words of given complexitylevels. We propose a simple but effective approach for this task based on complexityembedding while controlling sentence length and syntactic complexity at the decodingstage. Compared with potential solutions, our approach fuses the representations of theword complexity levels into the model to get better control of lexical complexity. Andwe demonstrate the feasibility of the approach for both training models from scratch andfine-tuning the pre-trained models. To facilitate the research, we develop two datasetsin English and Chinese respectively, on which extensive experiments are conducted. Ex-perimental results show that our approach provides more precise control over lexicalcomplexity, as well as better fluency and diversity.”