IrekiaLFes: a New Open Benchmark and Baseline Systems for Spanish Automatic Text Simplification

Abstract

Automatic Text simplification (ATS) seeks to reduce the complexity of a text for a general public or a target audience. In the last years, deep learning methods have become the most used systems in ATS research, but these systems need large and good quality datasets to be evaluated. Moreover, these data are available on a large scale only for English and in some cases with restrictive licenses. In this paper, we present IrekiaLF_es, an open-license benchmark for Spanish text simplification. It consists of a document-level corpus and a sentence-level test set that has been manually aligned. We also conduct a neurolinguistically-based evaluation of the corpus in order to reveal its suitability for text simplification. This evaluation follows the Lexicon-Unification-Linearity (LeULi) model of neurolinguistic complexity assessment. Finally, we present a set of experiments and baselines of ATS systems in a zero-shot scenario.