A Multilingual Human Annotated Corpus of Original and Easy-to-Read Texts to Support Access to Democratic Participatory Processes

Abstract

Being able to understand information is a key factor for a self-determined life and society. The study of automatic text simplification is often limited by the availability of high quality material for the training and evaluation on automatic simplifiers. This is true for English, but more so for less resourced languages like Spanish, Catalan and Italian. In order to fill this gap, we present a corpus of of original texts with high quality simplification produced by human experts in text simplification. It was developed within a project to assess the impact of Easy-to-Read (E2R) language for democratic participation. The original texts were compiled from domains related to this topic. The corpus includes different text types, selected based on relevance, copyright availability, and ethical standards. All texts were simplified to Easy-to-Read level. The corpora hold significant scientific value, particularly as it includes the first annotated corpora of its kind for the Catalan language. It also represents a noteworthy contribution for Spanish and Italian, offering high-quality, human-annotated language resources that are rarely available in these domains. The corpora will be made freely accessible to the public.

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