Revisiting non-English Text Simplification: A Unified Multilingual Benchmark

Abstract

Recent advancements in high-quality, large-scale English resources have pushed the frontier of English Automatic Text Simplification (ATS) research. However, less work has been done on multilingual text simplification due to the lack of a diverse evaluation benchmark that covers complex-simple sentence pairs in many languages. This paper introduces the MULTISIM benchmark, a collection of 27 resources in 12 distinct languages containing over 1.7 million complex-simple sentence pairs. This benchmark will encourage research in developing more effective multilingual text simplification models and evaluation metrics. Our experiments using MULTISIM with pre-trained multilingual language models reveal exciting performance improvements from multilingual training in non-English settings. We observe strong performance from Russian in zero-shot crosslingual transfer to low-resource languages. We further show that few-shot prompting with BLOOM-176b achieves comparable quality to reference simplifications outperforming finetuned models in most languages. We validate these findings through human evaluation.