We report three user studies in which the Lexical Simplification needs of non-native English speakers are investigated. Our analyses feature valuable new insight on the relationship between the non-natives’ notion of complexity and various morphological, semantic and lexical word properties. Some of our findings contradict long-standing misconceptions about word simplicity. The data produced in...

Textual complexity is widely used to assess the difficulty of reading materials and writing quality in student essays. At a lexical level, word complexity can represent a building block for creating a comprehensive model of lexical networks that adequately estimates learners’ understanding. In order to best capture how lexical associations are created between related concepts, we propose automa...

In this paper, we describe the system we submitted to the SemEval-2012 Lexical Simplification Task. Our system (mmSystem) combines word frequency with decompositional semantics criteria based on syntactic structure in order to rank candidate substitutes of lexical forms of arbitrary syntactic complexity (oneword, multi-word, etc.) in descending order of (cognitive) simplicity. We believe that t...

The work we present here addresses cue-based noun classification in English and Spanish. Its main objective is to automatically acquire lexical semantic information by classifying nouns into previously known noun lexical classes. This is achieved by using particular aspects of linguistic contexts as cues that identify a specific lexical class. Here we concentrate on the task of identifying such...