Exploring Automatic Text Simplification of German Narrative Documents

In this paper, we apply transformer-based Natural Language Generation (NLG) techniques to the problem of text simplification. Currently, there are only a few German datasets available for text simplification, even fewer with larger and aligned documents, and not a single one with narrative texts. In this paper, we explore to which degree modern NLG techniques can be applied to German narrative text simplifications. We use Longformer attention and a pre-trained mBART model. Our findings indicate that the existing approaches for German are not able to solve the task properly. We conclude on a few directions for future research to address this problem.