@article{papucci-etal-2026-controllable,
    title = "Controllable Sentence Simplification in {I}talian: Fine-Tuning Large Language Models on Automatically Generated Resources",
    author = "Papucci, Michele  and
      Venturi, Giulia  and
      Dell'Orletta, Felice",
    editor = "Piperidis, Stelios  and
      Bel, N{\'u}ria  and
      van den Heuvel, Henk  and
      Ide, Nancy  and
      Krek, Simon  and
      Toral, Antonio",
    journal = "International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation",
    volume = "main",
    month = may,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Palma de Mallorca, Spain",
    publisher = "ELRA Language Resource Association",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.570/",
    pages = "7178--7191",
    abstract = "This paper presents a study on readability-controlled Sentence Simplification for Italian, addressing the scarcity of annotated resources for low-resource languages. We introduce IMPaCTS (Italian Multilevel Parallel Corpus for Text Simplification), the first fully automatically created corpus of 1,444,160 original{--}simple sentence pairs automatically annotated with readability levels and linguistic features. It was generated using an Italian LLM prompted in zero-shot to produce multiple simplifications per input sentence. Increasing portions of the resource are used to fine-tune mono- and multilingual open-weight LLMs, conditioning them to generate simplifications at a target readability level. Results from automatic and human evaluations show that fine-tuning on IMPaCTS improves performance both in terms of task completion and adherence to the targeted readability levels compared to few-shot baselines."
}