SIMPITIKI: a Simplification corpus for Italian

In this work, we analyse whether Wikipedia can be used to leverage simplification pairs instead of Simple Wikipedia, which has proved unreliable for assessing automatic simplification systems, and is available only in English. We focus on sentence pairs in which the target sentence is the outcome of a Wikipedia edit marked as ‘simplified’, and manually annotate simplification phenomena following an existing scheme proposed for previous simplification corpora in Italian. The outcome of this work is the SIMPITIKI corpus, which we make freely available, with pairs of sentences extracted from Wikipedia edits and annotated with simplification types. The resource contains also another corpus with roughly the same number of simplifications, which was manually created by simplifying documents in the administrative domain.