Datasets:
annotations_creators:
- no-annotation
language:
- de
language_creators:
- expert-generated
license:
- other
multilinguality:
- translation
- monolingual
pretty_name: DEplain-web
size_categories:
- <1K
source_datasets:
- original
tags:
- web-text
- plain language
- easy-to-read language
- document simplification
task_categories:
- text2text-generation
task_ids:
- text-simplification
DEplain-web-doc: A corpus for German Document Simplification
DEplain-web-doc is a subcorpus of DEplain Stodden et al., 2023 for document simplification. The corpus consists of 396 (199/50/147) parallel documents crawled from the web in standard German and plain German (or easy-to-read German). All documents are either published under an open license or the copyright holders gave us the permission to share the data. If you are interested in a larger corpus, please check our paper and the provided web crawler to download more parallel documents with a closed license.
Human annotators also sentence-wise aligned the 147 documents of the test set to build a corpus for sentence simplification. For the sentence-level version of this corpus, please see https://huggingface.co/datasets/DEplain/DEplain-web-sent.
The documents of the training and development set were automatically aligned using MASSalign. You can find this data here: https://github.com/rstodden/DEPlain/. If you use the automatically aligned data, please use it cautiously, as the alignment quality might be error-prone.
Dataset Card for DEplain-web-doc
Table of Contents
- Dataset Description
- Dataset Structure
- Dataset Creation
- Considerations for Using the Data
- Additional Information
Dataset Description
- Repository: DEplain-web GitHub repository
- Paper: Regina Stodden, Momen Omar, and Laura Kallmeyer. 2023. "DEplain: A German Parallel Corpus with Intralingual Translations into Plain Language for Sentence and Document Simplification.". In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Point of Contact: Regina Stodden
Dataset Summary
DEplain-web (Stodden et al., 2023) is a dataset for the evaluation of sentence and document simplification in German. All texts of this dataset are scraped from the web. All documents were licenced with an open license. The simple-complex sentence pairs are manually aligned. This dataset only contains a test set. For additional training and development data, please scrape more data from the web using a web scraper for text simplification data and align the sentences of the documents automatically using, for example, MASSalign by Paetzold et al. (2017).
Supported Tasks and Leaderboards
The dataset supports the evaluation of text-simplification
systems. Success in this task is typically measured using the SARI and FKBLEU metrics described in the paper Optimizing Statistical Machine Translation for Text Simplification.
Languages
The texts in this dataset are written in German (de-de). The texts are in German plain language variants, e.g., plain language (Einfache Sprache) or easy-to-read language (Leichte Sprache).
Domains
The texts are from 6 different domains: fictional texts (literature and fairy tales), bible texts, health-related texts, texts for language learners, texts for accessibility, and public administration texts.
Dataset Structure
Data Access
- The dataset is licensed with different open licenses dependent on the subcorpora.
Data Instances
document-simplification
configuration: an instance consists of an original document and one reference simplification.sentence-simplification
configuration: an instance consists of an original sentence and one manually aligned reference simplification. Please see https://huggingface.co/datasets/DEplain/DEplain-web-sent.sentence-wise alignment
configuration: an instance consists of original and simplified documents and manually aligned sentence pairs. In contrast to the sentence-simplification configurations, this configuration contains also sentence pairs in which the original and the simplified sentences are exactly the same. Please see https://github.com/rstodden/DEPlain
Data Fields
data field | data field description |
---|---|
original |
an original text from the source dataset |
simplification |
a simplified text from the source dataset |
pair_id |
document pair id |
complex_document_id (on doc-level) |
id of complex document (-1) |
simple_document_id (on doc-level) |
id of simple document (-0) |
original_id (on sent-level) |
id of sentence(s) of the original text |
simplification_id (on sent-level) |
id of sentence(s) of the simplified text |
domain |
text domain of the document pair |
corpus |
subcorpus name |
simple_url |
origin URL of the simplified document |
complex_url |
origin URL of the simplified document |
simple_level or language_level_simple |
required CEFR language level to understand the simplified document |
complex_level or language_level_original |
required CEFR language level to understand the original document |
simple_location_html |
location on hard disk where the HTML file of the simple document is stored |
complex_location_html |
location on hard disk where the HTML file of the original document is stored |
simple_location_txt |
location on hard disk where the content extracted from the HTML file of the simple document is stored |
complex_location_txt |
location on hard disk where the content extracted from the HTML file of the simple document is stored |
alignment_location |
location on hard disk where the alignment is stored |
simple_author |
author (or copyright owner) of the simplified document |
complex_author |
author (or copyright owner) of the original document |
simple_title |
title of the simplified document |
complex_title |
title of the original document |
license |
license of the data |
last_access or access_date |
data origin data or data when the HTML files were downloaded |
rater |
id of the rater who annotated the sentence pair |
alignment |
type of alignment, e.g., 1:1, 1:n, n:1 or n:m |
Data Splits
DEplain-web contains a training set, a development set and a test set. The dataset was split based on the license of the data. All manually-aligned sentence pairs with an open license are part of the test set. The document-level test set, also only contains the documents which are manually aligned. For document-level dev and test set the documents which are not aligned or not public available are used. For the sentence-level, the alingment pairs can be produced by automatic alignments (see Stodden et al., 2023).
Document-level:
Train | Dev | Test | Total | |
---|---|---|---|---|
DEplain-web-manual-open | - | - | 147 | 147 |
DEplain-web-auto-open | 199 | 50 | - | 279 |
DEplain-web-auto-closed | 288 | 72 | - | 360 |
in total | 487 | 122 | 147 | 756 |
Sentence-level:
Train | Dev | Test | Total | |
---|---|---|---|---|
DEplain-web-manual-open | - | - | 1846 | 1846 |
DEplain-web-auto-open | 514 | 138 | - | 652 |
DEplain-web-auto-closed | 767 | 175 | - | 942 |
in total | 1281 | 313 | 1846 |
subcorpus | simple | complex | domain | description | \ doc. |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
EinfacheBücher | Plain German | Standard German / Old German | fiction | Books in plain German | 15 |
EinfacheBücherPassanten | Plain German | Standard German / Old German | fiction | Books in plain German | 4 |
ApothekenUmschau | Plain German | Standard German | health | Health magazine in which diseases are explained in plain German | 71 |
BZFE | Plain German | Standard German | health | Information of the German Federal Agency for Food on good nutrition | 18 |
Alumniportal | Plain German | Plain German | language learner | Texts related to Germany and German traditions written for language learners. | 137 |
Lebenshilfe | Easy-to-read German | Standard German | accessibility | 49 | |
Bibel | Easy-to-read German | Standard German | bible | Bible texts in easy-to-read German | 221 |
NDR-Märchen | Easy-to-read German | Standard German / Old German | fiction | Fairytales in easy-to-read German | 10 |
EinfachTeilhaben | Easy-to-read German | Standard German | accessibility | 67 | |
StadtHamburg | Easy-to-read German | Standard German | public authority | Information of and regarding the German city Hamburg | 79 |
StadtKöln | Easy-to-read German | Standard German | public authority | Information of and regarding the German city Cologne | 85 |
: Documents per Domain in DEplain-web.
domain | avg. | std. | interpretation | \ sents | \ docs |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
bible | 0.7011 | 0.31 | moderate | 6903 | 3 |
fiction | 0.6131 | 0.39 | moderate | 23289 | 3 |
health | 0.5147 | 0.28 | weak | 13736 | 6 |
language learner | 0.9149 | 0.17 | almost perfect | 18493 | 65 |
all | 0.8505 | 0.23 | strong | 87645 | 87 |
: Inter-Annotator-Agreement per Domain in DEplain-web-manual.
operation | documents | percentage |
---|---|---|
rehphrase | 863 | 11.73 |
deletion | 3050 | 41.47 |
addition | 1572 | 21.37 |
identical | 887 | 12.06 |
fusion | 110 | 1.5 |
merge | 77 | 1.05 |
split | 796 | 10.82 |
in total | 7355 | 100 |
: Information regarding Simplification Operations in DEplain-web-manual.
Dataset Creation
Curation Rationale
Current German text simplification datasets are limited in their size or are only automatically evaluated. We provide a manually aligned corpus to boost text simplification research in German.
Source Data
Initial Data Collection and Normalization
The parallel documents were scraped from the web using a web scraper for text simplification data. The texts of the documents were manually simplified by professional translators. The data was split into sentences using a German model of SpaCy. Two German native speakers have manually aligned the sentence pairs by using the text simplification annotation tool TS-ANNO by Stodden & Kallmeyer (2022).
Who are the source language producers?
The texts of the documents were manually simplified by professional translators. See for an extensive list of the scraped URLs see Table 10 in Stodden et al. (2023).
Annotations
Annotation process
The instructions given to the annotators are available here.
Who are the annotators?
The annotators are two German native speakers, who are trained in linguistics. Both were at least compensated with the minimum wage of their country of residence. They are not part of any target group of text simplification.
Personal and Sensitive Information
No sensitive data.
Considerations for Using the Data
Social Impact of Dataset
Many people do not understand texts due to their complexity. With automatic text simplification methods, the texts can be simplified for them. Our new training data can benefit in training a TS model.
Discussion of Biases
no bias is known.
Other Known Limitations
The dataset is provided under different open licenses depending on the license of each website were the data is scraped from. Please check the dataset license for additional information.
Additional Information
Dataset Curators
DEplain-APA was developed by researchers at the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, Germany. This research is part of the PhD-program Online Participation'', supported by the North Rhine-Westphalian (German) funding scheme
Forschungskolleg''.
Licensing Information
The corpus includes the following licenses: CC-BY-SA-3, CC-BY-4, and CC-BY-NC-ND-4. The corpus also include a "save_use_share" license, for these documents the data provider permitted us to share the data for research purposes.
Citation Information
@inproceedings{stodden-etal-2023-deplain,
title = "{DE}-plain: A German Parallel Corpus with Intralingual Translations into Plain Language for Sentence and Document Simplification",
author = "Stodden, Regina and
Momen, Omar and
Kallmeyer, Laura",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
month = jul,
year = "2023",
address = "Toronto, Canada",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
notes = "preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18939",
}
This dataset card uses material written by Juan Diego Rodriguez and Yacine Jernite.