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

2026-03-05

AI Summary

This work addresses the scarcity of high-quality, human-annotated corpora for multilingual automatic text simplification, a challenge particularly acute for low-resource languages such as Spanish, Catalan, and Italian. To bridge this gap, the authors construct a novel multilingual two-layer corpus focused on democratic participation, comprising original texts and their expert-simplified, easy-to-read counterparts. Through rigorous text selection criteria and a controlled expert simplification protocol, the study presents the first publicly available easy-to-read corpus for Catalan and substantially expands the limited high-quality simplification data for Spanish and Italian. This resource fills a critical void in multilingual accessible text datasets, offering essential support for training and evaluating automatic text simplification systems, thereby advancing inclusive democratic engagement.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Machine Translation, Multilinguality, Cross-Lingual NLP
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Humans and AI: AI for Accessibility

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Data quality aspects of human-annotated datasets
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Multilingual and cross-lingual Web search
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data

Abstract

Being able to understand information is a key factor for a self-determined life and society. It is also very important for participating in democratic processes. 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 original texts for these 3 languages, with high quality simplification produced by human experts in text simplification. It was developed within the iDEM 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 E2R level. The corpus is particularity valuable because it includes the first annotated corpus 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 corpus will be made freely accessible to the public.

Problem

• automatic text simplification
• low-resource languages
• Easy-to-Read
• democratic participation
• human-annotated corpus

Innovation

• multilingual corpus
• Easy-to-Read (E2R)
• human-annotated simplification
• low-resource languages
• democratic participation