In the context of NLP tasks such as text simplification, lexicons containing information about semantically related words are an important resource for evaluating the quality of the system output. Existing resources containing lexical substitutes have been built with a focus on single words. In this paper, we present a lexical substitution dataset for Portuguese nominal compounds. The compounds...

This paper presents the systems we developed while participating in the first task (English Lexical Simplification) of SemEval 2012. Our first system relies on n-grams frequencies computed from the Simple English Wikipedia version, ranking each substitution term by decreasing frequency of use. We experimented with several other systems, based on term frequencies, or taking into account the cont...

Sentence simplification aims to reduce the reading complexity of a sentence by incorporating more accessible vocabulary and sentence structure. In this chapter we examine the process of lexical substitution and particularly the role that word sense disambiguation plays in this task. Most previous work substitutes difficult words using a predefined dictionary. We present the challenges faced dur...

In this paper we introduce a new lexical simplification approach. We extract over 30K candidate lexical simplifications by identifying aligned words in a sentencealigned corpus of English Wikipedia with Simple English Wikipedia. To apply these rules, we learn a feature-based ranker using SVMrank trained on a set of labeled simplifications collected using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Using human si...

Complex Word Identification (CWI) is an important task in lexical simplification and text accessibility. Due to the lack of CWI datasets, previous works largely depend on Simple English Wikipedia and edit histories for obtaining ‘gold standard’ annotations, which are of mixed quality, and limited to English only. We collect complex words/phrases (CP) for English, German and Spanish, annotated b...

Common techniques for acquiring semantic relations rely on static domain and linguistic resources, predefined patterns, and the presence of syntactic cues. We propose a hybrid approach which brings together established and novel techniques in lexical simplification, word disambiguation and association inference for acquiring coarse-grained relations between potentially ambiguous and composite t...

Lexical Simplification is the task of reducing the lexical complexity of textual documents by replacing difficult words with easier to read (or understand) expressions while preserving the original meaning. The development of robust pipelined multilingual architectures able to adapt to new languages is of paramount importance in lexical simplification. This paper describes and evaluates a modul...

Text Simplification is the task of reducing the lexical and syntactic complexity of documents in order to improve their readability and understandability. This paper presents a web-based demonstration of a text simplification system that performs state-of-the-art lexical and syntactic simplification of English texts. The core simplification technology used for this demonstration is highly custo...

In this study automatic lexical simplification via synonym replacement in Swedish was investigated using three different strategies for choosing alternative synonyms: based on word frequency, based on word length, and based on level of synonymy. These strategies were evaluated in terms of standardized readability metrics for Swedish, average word length, proportion of long words, and in relatio...