Simplifying Lexical Simplification: Do We Need Simplified Corpora?

Simplification of lexically complex texts, by replacing complex words with their simpler synonyms, helps non-native speakers, children, and language-impaired people understand text better. Recent lexical simplification methods rely on manually simplified corpora, which are expensive and time-consuming to build. We present an unsupervised approach to lexical simplification that makes use of the most recent word vector representations and requires only regular corpora. Results of both automated and human evaluation show that our simple method is as effective as systems that rely on simplified corpora.