Sentence simplification (SS) focuses on adapting sentences to enhance their readability and accessibility. While large language models (LLMs) match task-specific baselines in English SS, their performance in Portuguese remains underexplored. This paper presents a comprehensive performance comparison of 26 state-of-the-art LLMs in Portuguese SS, alongside two simplification models trained explicitly for this task and language. They are evaluated under a one-shot setting across scientific, news, and government datasets. We benchmark the models with our newly introduced Gov-Lang-BR corpus (1,703 complex-simple sentence pairs from Brazilian government agencies) and two established datasets: PorSimplesSent and Museum-PT. Our investigation takes advantage of both automatic metrics and large-scale linguistic analysis to examine the transformations achieved by the LLMs. Furthermore, a qualitative assessment of selected generated outputs provides deeper insights into simplification quality. Our findings reveal that while open-source LLMs have achieved impressive results, closed-source LLMs continue to outperform them in Portuguese SS.

This paper presents the Irapuarani team’s participation in SemEval-2025 Task 10, Subtask 2, which focuses on hierarchical multi-label classification of narratives from online news articles. We explored three distinct strategies: (1) a direct classification approach using a multilingual Small Language Model (SLM), disregarding the hierarchical structure; (2) a translation-based strategy where texts from multiple languages were translated into a single language using a Large Language Model (LLM), followed by classification with a monolingual SLM; and (3) a hybrid strategy leveraging an SLM to filter domains and an LLM to assign labels while accounting for the hierarchy. We conducted experiments on datasets in all available languages, namely Bulgarian, English, Hindi, Portuguese and Russian. Our results show that Strategy 2 is the most generalizable across languages, achieving test set rankings of 21st in English, 9th in Portuguese and Russian, 7th in Bulgarian, and 10th in Hindi.

Automatic text simplification focuses on transforming texts into a more comprehensible version without sacrificing their precision. However, automatic methods usually require (paired) datasets that can be rather scarce in languages other than English. This paper presents a new approach to automatic sentence simplification that leverages paraphrases, context, and linguistic attributes to overcome the absence of paired texts in Portuguese.We frame the simplification problem as a textual style transfer task and learn a style representation using the sentences around the target sentence in the document and its linguistic attributes. Moreover, unlike most unsupervised approaches that require style-labeled training data, we fine-tune strong pre-trained models using sentence-level paraphrases instead of annotated data. Our experiments show that our model achieves remarkable results, surpassing the current state-of-the-art (BART+ACCESS) while competitively matching a Large Language Model.

Material facts (MF) are crucial and obligatory disclosures that can significantly influence asset values. Following their release, financial analysts embark on the meticulous and highly specialized task of crafting analyses to shed light on their impact on company assets, a challenge elevated by the daily amount of MFs released. Generative AI, with its demonstrated power of crafting coherent text, emerges as a promising solution to this task. However, while these analyses must incorporate the MF, they must also transcend it, enhancing it with vital background information, valuable and grounded recommendations, prospects, potential risks, and their underlying reasoning. In this paper, we approach this task as an instance of controllable text generation, aiming to ensure adherence to the MF and other pivotal attributes as control elements. We first explore language models’ capacity to manage this task by embedding those elements into prompts and engaging popular chatbots. A bilingual proof of concept underscores both the potential and the challenges of applying generative AI techniques to this task.

This paper describes the BAMBAS team’s participation in SemEval-2024 Task 4 Subtask 1, which focused on the multilabel classification of persuasion techniques in the textual content of Internet memes. We explored a lightweight approach that does not consider the hierarchy of labels. First, we get the text embeddings leveraging the multilingual tweets-based language model, Bernice. Next, we use those embeddings to train a separate binary classifier for each label, adopting independent oversampling strategies in each model in a binary-relevance style. We tested our approach over the English dataset, exceeding the baseline by 21 percentage points, while ranking in 23th in terms of hierarchical F1 and 11st in terms of hierarchical recall.