Document-Level Text Simplification in Estonian Using Large Language Models

Meeri-Ly Muru, Eduard Barbu


Abstract
Document-level text simplification involves transformations that go beyond sentence-internal edits, addressing discourse coherence, anaphora resolution, and cross-paragraph consistency. Despite advances in sentence-level simplification for high-resource languages, document-level simplification in morphologically rich, low-resource languages such as Estonian remains largely unexplored. This study presents a comprehensive evaluation of five state-of-the-art multilingual large language models (LLMs) for document-level simplification in Estonian. Three prompting strategies are examined: single-pass generation, pipeline-based modular agents, and guideline-augmented pipelines. The evaluation framework integrates automatic metrics assessing readability, semantic preservation, and discourse coherence, alongside a structured manual annotation protocol. The findings indicate that Gemini-2.0 and LLaMA-3.3 produce outputs with near-native fluency and strong meaning preservation, whereas other models display notable grammatical and semantic limitations. This work contributes novel document-level coherence metrics, evidence-based prompting strategies, and publicly available resources for reproducibility.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-main.573
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
7225–7235
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.573/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Meeri-Ly Muru and Eduard Barbu. 2026. Document-Level Text Simplification in Estonian Using Large Language Models. International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, main:7225–7235.
Cite (Informal):
Document-Level Text Simplification in Estonian Using Large Language Models (Muru & Barbu, LREC 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.573.pdf