---
annotations_creators:
- expert-generated
language:
- de
language_creators:
- expert-generated
license:
- other
multilinguality:
- translation
- monolingual
pretty_name: DEplain-web-sent
size_categories:
- 1K<n<10K
source_datasets:
- extended|DEplain-web-doc
tags:
- sentence simplification
- web-text
- plain language
- easy-to-read language
task_categories:
- text2text-generation
task_ids:
- text-simplification
---


# DEplain-web-sent: A corpus for German Sentence Simplification
DEplain-web-sent is a subcorpus of DEplain [Stodden et al., 2023]((https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18939)) for evaluation of sentence simplification. 
The corpus consists of 1846 sentence pairs of 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 permission to share the data.
Human annotators sentence-wise aligned the 147 documents of the test set to build a corpus for sentence simplification. For the document-level version of this corpus, please see [https://huggingface.co/datasets/DEplain/DEplain-web-doc](https://huggingface.co/datasets/DEplain/DEplain-web-doc).
 
Due to the small size of the sentence pairs, we only provide a test set for evaluation of text simplification models. 
If you are interested in a larger corpus, please check our paper and the provided web crawler and alignment methods to extend the corpus. You can find this data here: [https://github.com/rstodden/DEPlain/](https://github.com/rstodden/DEPlain/tree/main/E__Sentence-level_Corpus/DEplain-web-sent/auto/open).
If you use the automatically aligned data, please use it cautiously, as the alignment quality might be error-prone. 

# Dataset Card for DEplain-web-sent

## Table of Contents
- [Dataset Description](#dataset-description)
  - [Dataset Summary](#dataset-summary)
  - [Supported Tasks and Leaderboards](#supported-tasks-and-leaderboards)
  - [Languages](#languages)
- [Dataset Structure](#dataset-structure)
  - [Data Instances](#data-instances)
  - [Data Fields](#data-fields)
  - [Data Splits](#data-splits)
- [Dataset Creation](#dataset-creation)
  - [Curation Rationale](#curation-rationale)
  - [Source Data](#source-data)
  - [Annotations](#annotations)
  - [Personal and Sensitive Information](#personal-and-sensitive-information)
- [Considerations for Using the Data](#considerations-for-using-the-data)
  - [Social Impact of Dataset](#social-impact-of-dataset)
  - [Discussion of Biases](#discussion-of-biases)
  - [Other Known Limitations](#other-known-limitations)
- [Additional Information](#additional-information)
  - [Dataset Curators](#dataset-curators)
  - [Licensing Information](#licensing-information)
  - [Citation Information](#citation-information)
  - [Contributions](#contributions)

## Dataset Description

- **Repository:** [DEplain-web GitHub repository](https://github.com/rstodden/DEPlain)
- **Paper:** ["DEplain: A German Parallel Corpus with Intralingual Translations into Plain Language for Sentence and Document Simplification."](https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18939)
- **Point of Contact:** [Regina Stodden](regina.stodden@hhu.de)

### Dataset Summary

[DEplain-web](https://github.com/rstodden/DEPlain) [(Stodden et al., 2023)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18939) 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](https://github.com/rstodden/data_collection_german_simplification) and align the sentences of the documents automatically using, for example, [MASSalign](https://github.com/ghpaetzold/massalign) by [Paetzold et al. (2017)](https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/I17-3001/).

### Supported Tasks and Leaderboards

The dataset supports the evaluation of `text-simplification` systems. Success in this task is typically measured using the [SARI](https://huggingface.co/metrics/sari) and [FKBLEU](https://huggingface.co/metrics/fkbleu) metrics described in the paper [Optimizing Statistical Machine Translation for Text Simplification](https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/Q16-1029.pdf).

### 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](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](https://github.com/rstodden/DEPlain/tree/main/C__Alignment_Algorithms)


### 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](https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18939)).

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](https://github.com/rstodden/data_collection_german_simplification).
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](https://github.com/rstodden/TS_annotation_tool) by [Stodden & Kallmeyer (2022)](https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-demo.14/). 

#### 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)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18939).

### Annotations

#### Annotation process

The instructions given to the annotators are available [here](https://github.com/rstodden/TS_annotation_tool/tree/master/annotation_schema).

#### 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](https://github.com/juand-r) and [Yacine Jernite](https://github.com/yjernite).