Selecting Proper Lexical Paraphrase for Children

We propose a method for acquiring plain lexical paraphrase using a Japanese dictionary in order to achieve lexical simplification for children. The proposed method extracts plain words that are the most similar to the headword from the dictionary definition. The definition statements describe the headword using plain words; therefore, paraphrasing by replacing the headword with the most similar word in the dictionary definition is expected to be an accurate means of lexical simplification. However, it is difficult to determine which word is the most appropriate for the paraphrase. The method proposed in this paper measures the similarity of each word in the definition statements against the headword and selects the one with the closest semantic match for the paraphrase. This method compares favorably with the method that acquires the target word from the end of the definition statements.