@inproceedings{ledoyen-etal-2025-facilitating,
    title = "Facilitating Cognitive Accessibility with {LLM}s: A Multi-Task Approach to Easy-to-Read Text Generation",
    author = {Ledoyen, Fran{\c{c}}ois  and
      Dias, Ga{\"e}l  and
      Pantin, Jeremie  and
      Lechervy, Alexis  and
      Maurel, Fabrice  and
      Chahir, Youssef},
    editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Rose, Carolyn  and
      Peng, Violet",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.596/",
    pages = "11782--11808",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-332-6",
    abstract = "Simplifying complex texts is essential to ensure equitable access to information, particularly for individuals with cognitive impairments. The Easy-to-Read (ETR) initiative provides a framework to make content more accessible for these individuals. However, manually creating such texts remains time-consuming and resource-intensive. In this work, we investigate the potential of large language models (LLMs) to automate the generation of ETR content. To address the scarcity of aligned corpora and the specific constraints of ETR, we propose a multi-task learning (MTL) approach that trains models jointly on text summarization, text simplification, and ETR generation. We explore two complementary strategies: multi-task retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for in-context learning (ICL), and MTL-LoRA for parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). Our experiments with Mistral-7B and LLaMA-3-8B, conducted on ETR-fr, a new high-quality dataset, show that MTL-LoRA consistently outperforms all other strategies in in-domain settings, while the MTL-RAG-based approach achieves better generalization in out-of-domain scenarios. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/FrLdy/ETR-PEFT-Composition."
}