EASSE-DE: Easier Automatic Sentence Simplification Evaluation for German

Abstract

In this work, we propose EASSE-multi, a framework for easier automatic sentence evaluation for languages other than English. Compared to the original EASSE framework, EASSE-multi does not focus only on English. It contains tokenizers and versions of text simplification evaluation metrics which are suitable for multiple languages. In this paper, we exemplify the usage of EASSE-multi for German TS, resulting in EASSE-DE. Further, we compare text simplification results when evaluating with different language or tokenization settings of the metrics. Based on this, we formulate recommendations on how to make the evaluation of (German) TS models more transparent and better comparable. The code of EASSE-multi and its German specialisation (EASSE-DE) can be found at https://github.com/rstodden/easse-de.