SimpCue: Cue-Based Prompting for Multilingual Text Simplification

Text simplification aims to make complex texts easier to understand while preserving their original meaning. Recent large language models can perform simplification through prompting, but it remains unclear whether adding explicit linguistic information about sentence complexity to the prompt improves their outputs. We investigate this question for multilingual sentence-level Easy-to-Read simplification in Catalan, Spanish, and Italian. Using Qwen3-8B, we compare a baseline prompt, a gold-cue prompt enriched with gold linguistic cues, and a predicted-cue prompt enriched with automatically predicted cues. We evaluate the outputs using SARI, BLEU, chrF, and BERTScore, and complement this evaluation with a manual qualitative analysis. Predicted-cue prompting obtains the best overall scores across all four metrics, although the gains over the baseline are small. Gold-cue prompting does not consistently improve over the baseline, and results vary across languages. These findings indicate that cue-based prompting can influence multilingual Easy-to-Read simplification, but its benefits are modest, metric-dependent, and language-dependent.

Example-Guided Prompting for Document-Level Text Simplification

Document-level text simplification requires large language models (LLMs) to rewrite complex documents while preserving meaning, readability, and discourse coherence. Although prompt-based LLMs have shown promising performance, they often produce inconsistent simplifications because textual instructions alone provide limited guidance for complex document-level transformations. We investigate whether retrieved document-simplification examples can improve document-level generation by augmenting prompts with examples selected from a parallel simplification corpus. This example-guided prompting approach enables LLMs to exploit relevant simplification patterns without task-specific fine-tuning. Experiments on the OneStopEnglish corpus using multiple state-of-the-art LLMs show that incorporating retrieved examples consistently improves simplification quality over prompt-only generation and achieves competitive or superior performance compared with representative supervised (T5) and planning-based (PlanSimp) document simplification systems. Furthermore, we find that the benefits of example-guided prompting vary across LLMs, suggesting that effective use of retrieved examples depends on a model's ability to integrate contextual information during generation.

A Human-in-the-Loop Corpus for LLM-Based Simplification of Scientific Summaries

Interdisciplinary research is accelerating, yet scientific papers remain difficult to understand outside their home fields. We study large language model (LLM)-based simplification of scientific texts and present a human-in-the-loop workflow that transforms expert summaries into more accessible versions for non-specialists. Using SciSummNet as the source corpus, we first generate baseline simplifications with GPT-4o-mini. In Phase 1, readers from STEM fields outside computer science identify difficult sentences and phrases and compare the original and GPT-simplified summaries in terms of comprehensibility, naturalness, and simplicity. In Phase 2, computer science experts use this feedback to create expert-edited reference simplifications. We release the resulting corpus together with human judgments and automatic evaluation results. The Phase 1 judgments show a clear preference for the GPT-generated summaries in terms of comprehensibility and simplicity, while qualitative analysis of the Phase 2 edits highlights the importance of preserving domain-specific terminology and the strength of scientific claims. The resulting resource supports the training and benchmarking of simplification systems for cross-disciplinary scientific communication.

HULAT2 at MER-TRANS 2026: Governed Multi-Agent Simplification for Spanish Easy-to-Read Generation

This paper describes the participation of HULAT2-UC3M in the Spanish track of MER-TRANS 2026, a shared task on multilingual Easy-to-Read translation. Three fully automatic Spanish runs were submitted. RUN1 and RUN2 used a LangGraph-based multi-agent workflow combining Gemini 2.5 Flash and RigoChat-7B-v2, parallel generation strategies, internal quality signals, Event-Condition-Action routing, controlled editing and traceable decisions. RUN1 used the base workflow, while RUN2 activated an additional lexical-support layer based on a glossary and lexical resources. RUN3 was a RigoChat-based generate-evaluate-regenerate baseline with prompt engineering and LoRA-based adaptation. The official leaderboard reports BLEU-Orig, BLEU-Gold, SARI and BERTScore. During development, additional internal signals were also inspected, including semantic fidelity, readability, lexical simplicity, syntactic clarity and factual consistency. According to official SARI, RUN1 was the best HULAT2 run, with 44.0543 points, followed by RUN2 with 43.1049 and RUN3 with 38.5136. These results indicate that, in this task setting, signal-guided multi-agent routing outperformed the linear regeneration baseline. They also show that adding lexical support did not automatically improve reference-based scores. Further segment-level and document-level analysis are required to assess readability, factual consistency and user-oriented adequacy.