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README.md

DEPlain: DEplain-APA for Sentence Simplification

This directory contains the sentence-level data of DEplain-web (DEplain-web) split into subdirectories based on the alignment type and license of the documents.

Dataset Statement for DEplain-web

The dataset statement and the dataset can also be found on huggingface: https://huggingface.co/datasets/DEplain/DEplain-web-sent.

Table of Contents

Dataset Description

Dataset Summary

DEplain-web (Stodden et al., 2023) is a dataset for the evaluation of sentence and document simplification in German. All texts of this dataset are scraped from the web. All documents were licenced with an open license. The simple-complex sentence pairs are manually aligned. This dataset only contains a test set. For additional training and development data, please scrape more data from the web using a web scraper for text simplification data and align the sentences of the documents automatically using, for example, MASSalign by Paetzold et al. (2017).

Supported Tasks and Leaderboards

The dataset supports the evaluation of text-simplification systems. Success in this task is typically measured using the SARI and FKBLEU metrics described in the paper Optimizing Statistical Machine Translation for Text Simplification.

Languages

The texts in this dataset are written in German (de-de). The texts are in German plain language variants, e.g., plain language (Einfache Sprache) or easy-to-read language (Leichte Sprache).

Domains

The texts are from 6 different domains: fictional texts (literature and fairy tales), bible texts, health-related texts, texts for language learners, texts for accessibility, and public administration texts.

Dataset Structure

Data Access

  • The dataset is licensed with different open licenses dependent on the subcorpora.

Data Instances

  • document-simplification configuration: an instance consists of an original document and one reference simplification.
  • sentence-simplification configuration: an instance consists of an original sentence and one manually aligned reference simplification.
  • sentence-wise alignment configuration: an instance consists of original and simplified documents and manually aligned sentence pairs. In contrast to the sentence-simplification configurations, this configuration contains also sentence pairs in which the original and the simplified sentences are exactly the same.

Data Fields

data field data field description
original an original text from the source dataset
simplification a simplified text from the source dataset
pair_id document pair id
complex_document_id (on doc-level) id of complex document (-1)
simple_document_id (on doc-level) id of simple document (-0)
original_id (on sent-level) id of sentence(s) of the original text
simplification_id (on sent-level) id of sentence(s) of the simplified text
domain text domain of the document pair
corpus subcorpus name
simple_url origin URL of the simplified document
complex_url origin URL of the simplified document
simple_level or language_level_simple required CEFR language level to understand the simplified document
complex_level or language_level_original required CEFR language level to understand the original document
simple_location_html location on hard disk where the HTML file of the simple document is stored
complex_location_html location on hard disk where the HTML file of the original document is stored
simple_location_txt location on hard disk where the content extracted from the HTML file of the simple document is stored
complex_location_txt location on hard disk where the content extracted from the HTML file of the simple document is stored
alignment_location location on hard disk where the alignment is stored
simple_author author (or copyright owner) of the simplified document
complex_author author (or copyright owner) of the original document
simple_title title of the simplified document
complex_title title of the original document
license license of the data
last_access or access_date data origin data or data when the HTML files were downloaded
rater id of the rater who annotated the sentence pair
alignment type of alignment, e.g., 1:1, 1:n, n:1 or n:m

Data Splits

DEplain-web contains a training set, development set and a test set. The dataset was split based on the license of the data. All manually-aligned sentence pairs with an open license are part of the test set. The document-level test set, also only contains the documents which are manually aligned. For document-level dev and test set the documents which are not aligned or not public available are used. For the sentence-level, the alingment pairs can be produced by automatic alignments (see Stodden et al., 2023).

Document-level:

Train Dev Test Total
DEplain-web-manual-open - - 147 147
DEplain-web-auto-open 199 50 - 279
DEplain-web-auto-closed 288 72 - 360
in total 487 122 147 756

Sentence-level:

Train Dev Test Total
DEplain-web-manual-open - - 1846 1846
DEplain-web-auto-open 514 138 - 652
DEplain-web-auto-closed 767 175 - 942
in total 1281 313 1846
subcorpus simple complex domain description # doc.
EinfacheBücher Plain German Standard German / Old German fiction Books in plain German 15
EinfacheBücherPassanten Plain German Standard German / Old German fiction Books in plain German 4
ApothekenUmschau Plain German Standard German health Health magazine in which diseases are explained in plain German 71
BZFE Plain German Standard German health Information of the German Federal Agency for Food on good nutrition 18
Alumniportal}* Plain German Plain German language learner Texts related to Germany and German traditions written for language learners. 137
Lebenshilfe Easy-to-read German Standard German accessibility 49
Bibel Easy-to-read German Standard German bible Bible texts in easy-to-read German 221
**NDR-Märchen ** Easy-to-read German Standard German / Old German fiction Fairytales in easy-to-read German 10
EinfachTeilhaben Easy-to-read German Standard German accessibility 67
StadtHamburg Easy-to-read German Standard German public authority Information of and regarding the German city Hamburg 79
StadtKöln Easy-to-read German Standard German public authority Information of and regarding the German city Cologne 85

: Documents per Domain in DEplain-web.

domain avg. std. interpretation # sents # docs
bible 0.7011 0.31 moderate 6903 3
fiction 0.6131 0.39 moderate 23289 3
health 0.5147 0.28 weak 13736 6
language learner 0.9149 0.17 almost perfect 18493 65
all 0.8505 0.23 strong 87645 87

: Inter-Annotator-Agreement per Domain in DEplain-web-manual.

operation # documents percentage
rehphrase 863 11.73
deletion 3050 41.47
addition 1572 21.37
identical 887 12.06
fusion 110 1.5
merge 77 1.05
split 796 10.82
in total 7355 100

: Information regarding Simplification Operations in DEplain-web-manual.

Dataset Creation

Curation Rationale

Current German text simplification datasets are limited in their size or are only automatically evaluated. We provide a manually aligned corpus to boost text simplification research in German.

Source Data

Initial Data Collection and Normalization

The parallel documents were scraped from the web using a web scraper for text simplification data. The texts of the documents were manually simplified by professional translators. The data was split into sentences using a German model of SpaCy. Two German native speakers have manually aligned the sentence pairs by using the text simplification annotation tool TS-ANNO by Stodden & Kallmeyer (2022).

Who are the source language producers?

The texts of the documents were manually simplified by professional translators. See for an extensive list of the scraped URLs see Table 10 in Stodden et al. (2023).

Annotations

Annotation process

The instructions given to the annotators are available here.

Who are the annotators?

The annotators are two German native speakers, who are trained in linguistics. Both were at least compensated with the minimum wage of their country of residence. They are not part of any target group of text simplification.

Personal and Sensitive Information

No sensitive data.

Considerations for Using the Data

Social Impact of Dataset

Many people do not understand texts due to their complexity. With automatic text simplification methods, the texts can be simplified for them. Our new training data can benefit in training a TS model.

Discussion of Biases

no bias is known.

Other Known Limitations

The dataset is provided under different open licenses depending on the license of each website were the data is scraped from. Please check the dataset license for additional information.

Additional Information

Dataset Curators

DEplain-APA was developed by researchers at the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, Germany. This research is part of the PhD-program Online Participation'', supported by the North Rhine-Westphalian (German) funding scheme Forschungskolleg''.

Licensing Information

The corpus includes the following licenses: CC-BY-SA-3, CC-BY-4, and CC-BY-NC-ND-4. The corpus also include a "save_use_share" license, for these documents the data provider permitted us to share the data for research purposes.

Citation Information

@inproceedings{stodden-etal-2023-deplain,
    title = "{DE}-plain: A German Parallel Corpus with Intralingual Translations into Plain Language for Sentence and Document Simplification",
    author = "Stodden, Regina  and
      Momen, Omar  and
      Kallmeyer, Laura",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    notes = "preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18939",
}

This dataset card uses material written by Juan Diego Rodriguez and Yacine Jernite.