Adapting Sentence-level Automatic Metrics for Document-level Simplification Evaluation

Mounica Maddela, Fernando Alva-Manchego


Abstract
Text simplification aims to enhance the clarity and comprehensibility of a complex text while preserving its original meaning. Previous research on the automatic evaluation of text simplification has primarily focused on sentence simplification, with commonly used metrics such as SARI and advanced metrics such as LENS being trained and evaluated at the sentence level. However, these metrics often underperform on longer texts. In our study, we propose a novel approach to adapt existing sentence-level metrics for paragraph- or document-level simplification. We benchmark our approach against a wide variety of existing reference-based and reference-less metrics across multiple domains. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach outperforms traditional sentence-level metrics in terms of correlation with human judgment. Furthermore, we evaluate the sensitivity and robustness of various metrics to different types of errors produced by existing text simplification systems.
Anthology ID:
2025.naacl-long.327
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6444–6459
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-long.327/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mounica Maddela and Fernando Alva-Manchego. 2025. Adapting Sentence-level Automatic Metrics for Document-level Simplification Evaluation. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6444–6459, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Adapting Sentence-level Automatic Metrics for Document-level Simplification Evaluation (Maddela & Alva-Manchego, NAACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-long.327.pdf