Language Models for German Text Simplification: Overcoming Parallel Data Scarcity through Style-specific Pre-training

Abstract: Automatic text simplification systems help to reduce textual information barriers on the internet. However, for languages other than English, only few parallel data to train these systems exists. We propose a two-step approach to overcome this data scarcity issue. First, we fine-tuned LLMs on a corpus of German Easy Language, a specific style of German. Then, we used these models as decoders in a sequence-to-sequence simplification task. We show that the LLMs adapt to the style characteristics of Easy Language and output more accessible texts. Moreover, with the style-specific pre-training, we reduced the number of trainable parameters in text simplification models. Hence, less parallel data is sufficient for training. Our results indicate that pre-training on unaligned data can reduce the required parallel data while improving the performance on downstream tasks.