In the age of knowledge, the democratisation of information facilitated through the Internet may not be as pervasive if written language poses challenges to particular sectors of the population. The objective of this paper is to present an overview of research-based automatic text simplification tools. Consequently, we describe aspects such as the language, language phenomena, language levels simplified, approaches, specific target populations these tools are created for (e.g. individuals with cognitive impairment, attention deficit, elderly people, children, language learners), and accessibility and availability considerations. The review of existing studies covering automatic text simplification tools is undergone by searching two databases: Web of Science and Scopus. The eligibility criteria involve text simplification tools with a scientific background in order to ascertain how they operate. This methodology yielded 27 text simplification tools that are further analysed. Some of the main conclusions reached with this review are the lack of resources accessible to the public, the need for customisation to foster the individual’s independence by allowing the user to select what s/he finds challenging to understand while not limiting the user’s capabilities and the need for more simplification tools in languages other than English, to mention a few.

This paper presents the ongoing work conducted within the ClearText project, specifically focusing on the resource creation for the simplification of Spanish for people with cognitive disabilities. These resources include the CLEARSIM corpus and the Simple.Text tool. On the one hand, a description of the corpus compilation process with the help of APSA is detailed along with information regarding whether these texts are bronze, silver or gold standard simplification versions from the original text. The goal to reach is 18,000 texts in total by the end of the project. On the other hand, we aim to explore Large Language Models (LLMs) in a sequence-to-sequence setup for text simplification at the document level. Therefore, the tool’s objectives, technical aspects, and the preliminary results derived from early experimentation are also presented. The initial results are subject to improvement, given that experimentation is in a very preliminary stage. Despite showcasing flaws inherent to generative models (e.g. hallucinations, repetitive text), we examine the resolutions (or lack thereof) of complex linguistic phenomena that can be learned from the corpus. These issues will be addressed throughout the remainder of this project. The expected positive results from this project that will impact society are three-fold in nature: scientific-technical, social, and economic.