Benchmarking Lexical Simplification Systems

Lexical Simplification is the task of replacing complex words in a text with simpler alternatives. A variety of strategies have been devised for this challenge, yet there has been little effort in comparing their performance. In this contribution, we present a benchmarking of several Lexical Simplification systems. By combining resources created in previous work with automatic spelling and inflection correction techniques, we introduce BenchLS: a new evaluation dataset for the task. Using BenchLS, we evaluate the performance of solutions for various steps in the typical Lexical Simplification pipeline, both individually and jointly. This is the first time Lexical Simplification systems are compared in such fashion on the same data, and the findings introduce many contributions to the field, revealing several interesting properties of the systems evaluated.