Japanese Lexical Simplification for Non-Native Speakers

This paper introduces Japanese lexical simplification. Japanese lexical simplification is the task of replacing complex words in a given sentence with simple words to produce a new sentence without changing the original meaning of the sentence. We propose a method of supervised regression learning to estimate complexity ordering of words with statistical features obtained from two types of Japanese corpora. For the similarity of words, we use a Japanese thesaurus and dependency-based word embeddings. Evaluation of the proposed method is performed by comparing the complexity ordering of the words.