BATS: BenchmArking Text Simplicity 🦇

Evaluation of text simplification currently focuses on the difference between a source text and its simplified variant. Datasets for this evaluation base on a specific topic and group of readers for which is simplified. The broad applicability of text simplification and specifics that come with intended target audiences (e.g., children compared to adult non-experts) are disregarded. An explainable assessment of the overall simplicity of text is missing. This work is BenchmArking Text Simplicity (BATS): we provide an explainable method to assess practical and concrete rules from literature describing features of simplicity and complexity of text. Our experiments on 15 datasets for text simplification highlight differences in features that are important in different domains of text and for different intended target audiences.