Text simplification aims to make complex text more accessible by reducing linguistic complexity while preserving the original meaning. However, progress in this area remains limited for mid-resource and low-resource languages due to the scarcity of high-quality data. To address this gap, we introduce OasisSimp, a multilingual dataset for sentence-level text simplification covering five languages: English, Sinhala, Tamil, Pashto, and Thai. Among these, no prior sentence simplification datasets exist for Thai, Pashto, and Tamil, while limited data is available for Sinhala. Each language simplification dataset was created through direct human annotation, where trained annotators followed detailed guidelines to simplify sentences while maintaining meaning, fluency, and grammatical correctness. We evaluate eight open-weight multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) on OasisSimp and observe substantial performance disparities between high-resource and low-resource languages, highlighting the simplification challenges in multilingual settings. OasisSimp thus provides both a valuable multilingual resource and a challenging benchmark, revealing the limitations of current LLM-based simplification methods and paving the way for future research in low-resource text simplification. The dataset will be open-sourced upon acceptance.

Despite the progress in building multilingual language models, evaluation is often limited to a few languages with available datasets which excludes a large number of low-resource languages. In this paper, we create SIB-200—a large-scale open-sourced benchmark dataset for topic classification in 205 languages and dialects to address the lack of evaluation dataset for Natural Language Understanding (NLU). For many of the languages covered in SIB-200, this is the first publicly available evaluation dataset for NLU. The dataset is based on Flores-200 machine translation corpus. We annotated the English portion of the dataset and extended the sentence-level annotation to the remaining 204 languages covered in the corpus. Despite the simplicity of this task, our evaluation in full-supervised setting, cross-lingual transfer setting and prompting of large language model setting show that there is still a large gap between the performance of high-resource and low-resource languages when multilingual evaluation is scaled to numerous world languages. We found that languages unseen during the pre-training of multilingual language models, languages from under-represented families (like Nilotic and Altantic-Congo), and languages from the regions of Africa, Americas, Oceania and South East Asia, often have the lowest performance on our topic classification dataset. We hope our dataset %will encourages a more inclusive evaluation of multilingual language models on a more diverse set of languages.