@inproceedings{khallaf-etal-2025-democracy,
    title = "Democracy Made Easy: Simplifying Complex Topics to Enable Democratic Participation",
    author = "Khallaf, Nouran  and
      Bott, Stefan  and
      Eugeni, Carlo  and
      O{'}Flaherty, John  and
      Sharoff, Serge  and
      Saggion, Horacio",
    editor = "Ginel, Mar{\'i}a Isabel Rivas  and
      Cadwell, Patrick  and
      Canavese, Paolo  and
      Hansen-Schirra, Silvia  and
      Kappus, Martin  and
      Matamala, Anna  and
      Noonan, Will",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Easy and Plain Language in Institutional Contexts (AI {\&} EL/PL)",
    month = jun,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Geneva, Switzerland",
    publisher = "European Association for Machine Translation",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/mtsummit-25-ingestion/2025.aielpl-1.10/",
    pages = "108--124",
    ISBN = "978-2-9701897-5-6",
    abstract = "Several people are excluded from democratic deliberation because the language which is used in this context may be too difficult to understand for them. Our iDEM project aims at lowering existing linguistic barriers in deliberative processes by developing technology to facilitate the translation of complicated text into easy to read formats which are more suitable for may people. In this paper we describe classification experiments for detecting different types of difficulties which should be amended in order to make texts easier to understand. We focus on a lexical simplification system which can achieve state-of-the-art results with the use of a free and open-weight Large Language Model for the Romance Languages in the iDEM project. Moreover, a sentence segmentation system is introduced that can create text segmentation for long sentences based on training data. We describe the iDEM mobile app, which will make our technology available as a service for end-users of our target populations."
}