@inproceedings{maharjan-shrestha-2025-hope,
    title = "{HOPE} at {TSAR} 2025 Shared Task Balancing Control and Complexity in Readability-Controlled Text Simplification",
    author = "Maharjan, Sujal  and
      Shrestha, Astha",
    editor = "Shardlow, Matthew  and
      Alva-Manchego, Fernando  and
      North, Kai  and
      Stodden, Regina  and
      Saggion, Horacio  and
      Khallaf, Nouran  and
      Hayakawa, Akio",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility and Readability (TSAR 2025)",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.tsar-1.23/",
    pages = "261--265",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-176-6",
    abstract = "This paper describes our submissions to the TSAR 2025 Shared Task on Readability-Controlled Text Simplification. We present a comparative study of three architectures a rule-based baseline, a heuristic-driven expert system, and a zero-shot generative T5 pipeline with a semantic guardrail. Our analysis shows a trade-off between the controllability of rule-based systems and the fluency of generative models. In this zero-shot setting, simpler, confined systems achieved superior meaning preservation scores compared to the more powerful but less predictable generative model. We present a diagnostic failure analysis on system outputs, illustrating how different architectures result in distinct error patterns such as under-simplification, information loss via heuristics, and semantic drift."
}