University of Amsterdam at the CLEF 2025 SimpleText Track

This paper reports on the University of Amsterdam’s participation in the CLEF 2025 SimpleText track. We participated in Task 1 both for sentence-level and document-level text simplification. We explored scientific text simplification using BART fine-tuning and jargon-aware prompting with LLaMA 3.1. Our plan-guided BART model achieved the highest SARI score at the sentence level, while long input document-level text simplification approaches scored close. LLaMA performed competitively without domain-specific training, highlighting the promise of large language models for zero-shot simplification. More generally, document-level coherence and handling of domain-specific terms remain key challenges for future work.