Democracy made easy: simplifying complex topics to enable democratic participation

Abstract

Several groups of people are excluded from democratic deliberation because the language used in this context may be too difficult for them to understand. Our iDEM project aims to reduce existing linguistic barriers in deliberative processes by developing technology to facilitate the translation of complicated text into Easy-to-Read formats that are more suitable for many people. In this paper, we describe classification experiments for detecting different types of difficulties which should be amended in order to make texts easier to understand. We focus on a lexical simplification system that can achieve state-of-the-art results with the use of a free and open-weight large language model for the Romance Languages in our project. Moreover, a sentence segmentation system is introduced to produce text segmentation for long sentences based on training data. Finally, we describe the iDEM mobile app, which will make our technology available as a service for end-users of our target populations.