{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/language-models-for-german-text","title":"Language Models for German Text Simplification: Overcoming Parallel Data Scarcity through Style-specific Pre-training","arxiv_id":"2305.12908","date":"2023-05-22","proceeding":null,"authors":["Miriam Anschütz","Joshua Oehms","Thomas Wimmer","Bartłomiej Jezierski","Georg Groh"],"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 language models 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 language models 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.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.12908v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.12908v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"language-models-for-german-text","repo_url":"https://github.com/miriull/language-models-german-simplification","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"text-simplification","task_name":"Text Simplification"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2305.12908","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}