We explore algorithms for the automatic generation of a limited-size lexicon from a document, such that the lexicon covers as much as possible of the semantic space of the original document, as specifically as possible. We evaluate six related algorithms that automatically derive limited-size vocabularies from Wikipedia articles, focusing on nouns and verbs. The proposed algorithms combine Pers...

In this paper, we propose using metaheuristics—in particular, simulated annealing and the new D-Bees algorithm—to solve word sense disambiguation as an optimization problem within a knowledge-based lexical substitution system. We are the first to perform such an extrinsic evaluation of metaheuristics, for which we use two standard lexical substitution datasets, one English and one German. We fi...

Most recent sentence simplification systems use basic machine translation models to learn lexical and syntactic paraphrases from a manually simplified parallel corpus. These methods are limited by the quality and quantity of manually simplified corpora, which are expensive to build. In this paper, we conduct an indepth adaptation of statistical machine translation to perform text simplification...

A system for the generation of sentences is proposed which operates on three levels (constituent, transformational, and lexical) in such a way that there results a simplification in formulation, which is accomplished by allowing the initial symbol S to dominate other occurences of the same symbol S, and by adopting the convention whereby first the constituent structure is generated from highest...

In this work we introduce and describe a language resource composed of lists of simpler synonyms for Spanish. The synonyms are divided in different senses taken from the Spanish OpenThesaurus, where context disambiguation was performed by using statistical information from the Web and Google Books Ngrams. This resource is freely available online and can be used for different NLP tasks such as l...

Identifying complex words (CWs) is an important, yet often overlooked, task within lexical simplification (The process of automatically replacing CWs with simpler alternatives). If too many words are identified then substitutions may be made erroneously, leading to a loss of meaning. If too few words are identified then those which impede a user’s understanding may be missed, resulting in a com...

Information in newspapers is often showed in the form of numerical expressions which present comprehension problems for many people, including people with disabilities, illiteracy or lack of access to advanced technology. The purpose of this paper is to motivate, describe, and demonstrate a rule-based lexical component that simplifies numerical expressions in Spanish texts. We propose an approa...

English. Automated lexical simplification has been performed so far focusing only on the replacement of single tokens with single tokens, and this choice has affected both the development of systems and the creation of benchmarks. In this paper, we argue that lexical simplification in real settings should deal both with single and multi-token terms, and present a benchmark created for the task....