Recent advancements in high-quality, large-scale English resources have pushed the frontier of English Automatic Text Simplification (ATS) research. However, less work has been done on multilingual text simplification due to the lack of a diverse evaluation benchmark that covers complex-simple sentence pairs in many languages. This paper introduces the MultiSim benchmark, a collection of 27 resources in 12 distinct languages containing over 1.7 million complex-simple sentence pairs. This benchmark will encourage research in developing more effective multilingual text simplification models and evaluation metrics. Our experiments using MultiSim with pre-trained multilingual language models reveal exciting performance improvements from multilingual training in non-English settings. We observe strong performance from Russian in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer to low-resource languages. We further show that few-shot prompting with BLOOM-176b achieves comparable quality to reference simplifications outperforming fine-tuned models in most languages. We validate these findings through human evaluation.

Authorship verification is the task of, given a document and a candi- date author, determining whether or not the document was written by the candi- date author. Traditional approaches to authorship verification have revolved around a “candidate author vs. everything else” approach. Thus, perhaps the most important aspect of performing authorship verification on a document is the development of an appropriate distractor set to represent “everything not the candidate author”. The validity of the results of such experiments hinges on the ability to develop an appropriately representative set of distractor documents. Here, we propose a method for performing authorship verification without the use of a distractor set. Using only training data from the candidate author, we are able to perform authorship verification with high confidence (greater than 90% accuracy rates across a large corpus).