Automatic Simplification of Lithuanian Administrative Texts

Abstract

Text simplification reduces the complexity of text while preserving essential information, thus making it more accessible to a broad range of readers, including individuals with cognitive disorders, non-native speakers, children, and the general public. In this paper, we present experiments on text simplification for the Lithuanian language, aiming to simplify administrative texts to a Plain Language level. We fine-tuned mT5 and mBART models for this task and evaluated the effectiveness of ChatGPT as well. We assessed simplification results via both quantitative metrics and qualitative evaluation. Our findings indicated that mBART performed the best as it achieved the best scores across all evaluation metrics. The qualitative analysis further supported these findings. ChatGPT experiments showed that it responded quite well to a short and simple prompt to simplify the given text; however, it ignored most of the rules given in a more elaborate prompt. Finally, our analysis revealed that BERTScore and ROUGE aligned moderately well with human evaluations, while BLEU and readability scores indicated lower or even negative correlations