Comparing Resources for Spanish Lexical Simplification

In this paper we study the effect of different lexical resources and strategies for selecting synonyms in a lexical simplification system for the Spanish language. The resources used for the experiments are the Spanish EuroWordNet, the Spanish Open Thesaurus and a combination of both. As for the synonym selection strategies, we have used both local and global contexts for word sense disambiguation. We present a novel evaluation framework in lexical simplification that takes into account the level of ambiguity of the word to be simplified. The evaluation compares various instances of the lexical simplification system, a gold standard, and a baseline. On the basis of our results we recommend different resources and word sense disambiguation methods depending on the ambiguity level of the target word to be simplified.