An Adaptable Lexical Simplification Architecture for Major
            Ibero-Romance Languages

Ferrés, Daniel; Saggion, Horacio; Guinovart, Xavier Gómez

doi:10.18653/v1/w17-5406

Cited by 10 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 12 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The TUNER Candidate Ranking System used in this evaluation is an adaptation of the TUNER Lexical Simplification architecture (Ferrés et al, 2017b ) to work with Spanish, Portuguese and English. Some components for English were obtained from the YATS Simplifier for English (Ferrés et al, 2016 ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The majority of proposed systems focus on the English language (Paetzold and Specia, 2017b ; Alva-Manchego et al, 2020 ), as it is the case with many tasks in the NLP world. Several works have proposed lexical simplification systems for Spanish (Bott et al, 2012 ; Baeza-Yates et al, 2015 ; Ferrés et al, 2017b ), Portuguese (Hartmann et al, 2020 ), French (Hmida et al, 2018 ), Chinese (Qiang et al, 2021 ), Japanese (Kajiwara and Yamamoto, 2015 ; Hading et al, 2016 ), and Swedish (Abrahamsson et al, 2014 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Lexical simplification benchmarks for English, Portuguese, and Spanish

Štajner¹,

Ferrés²,

Shardlow³

et al. 2022

Front. Artif. Intell.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Even in highly-developed countries, as many as 15–30% of the population can only understand texts written using a basic vocabulary. Their understanding of everyday texts is limited, which prevents them from taking an active role in society and making informed decisions regarding healthcare, legal representation, or democratic choice. Lexical simplification is a natural language processing task that aims to make text understandable to everyone by replacing complex vocabulary and expressions with simpler ones, while preserving the original meaning. It has attracted considerable attention in the last 20 years, and fully automatic lexical simplification systems have been proposed for various languages. The main obstacle for the progress of the field is the absence of high-quality datasets for building and evaluating lexical simplification systems. In this study, we present a new benchmark dataset for lexical simplification in English, Spanish, and (Brazilian) Portuguese, and provide details about data selection and annotation procedures, to enable compilation of comparable datasets in other languages and domains. As the first multilingual lexical simplification dataset, where instances in all three languages were selected and annotated using comparable procedures, this is the first dataset that offers a direct comparison of lexical simplification systems for three languages. To showcase the usability of the dataset, we adapt two state-of-the-art lexical simplification systems with differing architectures (neural vs. non-neural) to all three languages (English, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese) and evaluate their performances on our new dataset. For a fairer comparison, we use several evaluation measures which capture varied aspects of the systems' efficacy, and discuss their strengths and weaknesses. We find that a state-of-the-art neural lexical simplification system outperforms a state-of-the-art non-neural lexical simplification system in all three languages, according to all evaluation measures. More importantly, we find that the state-of-the-art neural lexical simplification systems perform significantly better for English than for Spanish and Portuguese, thus posing a question if such an architecture can be used for successful lexical simplification in other languages, especially the low-resourced ones.

show abstract

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lexical simplification benchmarks for English, Portuguese, and Spanish

Štajner¹,

Ferrés²,

Shardlow³

et al. 2022

Front. Artif. Intell.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…However, recently, unsupervised approaches have been improved in this regard by allowing more detailed context information to be obtained [33]. On the other hand, hybrid strategies employ methods from both the previous two approaches, such as [34], which uses a corpus-based approach and a combination of a free lexicon, decision trees, and context-based rules.…”

Section: Nlp Approaches To Lexical Simplificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lexical Simplification System to Improve Web Accessibility

2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

People with intellectual, language and learning disabilities face accessibility barriers when reading texts with complex words. Following accessibility guidelines, complex words can be identified, and easy synonyms and definitions can be provided for them as reading aids. To offer support to these reading aids, a lexical simplification system for Spanish has been developed and is presented in this article. The system covers the complex word identification (CWI) task and offers replacement candidates with the substitute generation and selection (SG/SS) task. These tasks have followed machine learning techniques and contextual embeddings using Easy Reading and Plain Language resources, such as dictionaries and corpora. Additionally, due to the polysemy present in the language, the system provides definitions for complex words, which are disambiguated by a rule-based method supported by a state-of-the-art embedding resource. This system is integrated into a web system that provides an easy way to improve the readability and comprehension of Spanish texts. The results obtained are satisfactory; in the CWI task, better results were obtained than with other systems that used the same dataset. The SG/SS task results are comparable to similar works in the English language and provide a solid starting point to improve this task for the Spanish language. Finally, the results of the disambiguation process evaluation were good when evaluated by a linguistic expert. These findings represent an additional advancement in the lexical simplification of texts in Spanish and in a generic domain using easy-to-read resources, among others, to provide systematic support to compliance with accessibility guidelines.

show abstract

“…However, recent approaches have improved by allowing more detailed context information to be obtained [73]. Similarly, hybrid approaches that leverage methods from the latter methods have emerged, such is the case of [74], which uses a corpus-based approach and a combination of a free lexicon, decision trees and context-based rules.…”

Section: Lexical Simplificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Designing and Evaluating a User Interface for People with Cognitive Disabilities

Moreno

Alarcón

Martı́nez

2021

Proceedings of the XXI International Conference on Human Computer Interaction

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The Internet has come a long way in recent years, contributing to the proliferation of large volumes of digitally available information. Through user interfaces we can access these contents, however, they are not accessible to everyone. The main users affected are people with disabilities, who are already a considerable number, but accessibility barriers affect a wide range of user groups and contexts of use in accessing digital information. Some of these barriers are caused by language inaccessibility when texts contain long sentences, unusual words and complex linguistic structures. These accessibility barriers directly affect people with cognitive disabilities. ResumenInternet ha avanzado mucho en los últimos años contribuyendo a la proliferación de grandes volúmenes de información disponible digitalmente. A través de interfaces de usuario podemos acceder a estos contenidos, sin embargo, estos no son accesibles a todas las personas. Los usuarios afectados principalmente son las personas con discapacidad siendo ya un número considerable, pero las barreras de accesibilidad afectan a un gran rango de grupos de usuarios y contextos de uso en el acceso a la información digital. Algunas de estas barreras son causadas por la inaccesibilidad al lenguaje cuando los textos contienen oraciones largas, palabras inusuales y estructuras lingüísticas complejas. Estas barreras de accesibilidad afectan directamente a las personas con discapacidad cognitiva.Con el fin de hacer el contenido textual más accesible, existen iniciativas como las pautas de Lectura Fácil, las pautas de Lenguaje Claro y algunas de las pautas de Accesibilidad al Contenido en la Web (WCAG) específicas para el lenguaje. Estas pautas proporcionan documentación, pero no especifican métodos para cumplir con los requisitos implícitos en estas pautas de manera sistemática. Para obtener una solución, los métodos de la disciplina del Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural (PLN) pueden dar un soporte para alcanzar la conformidad con las pautas de accesibilidad cognitiva relativas al lenguaje La tarea de la simplificación de textos del PLN tiene como objetivo reducir la complejidad lingüística de un texto desde una perspectiva sintáctica y léxica, siendo esta última el enfoque principal de esta Tesis. En este sentido, un espacio de solución es identificar en un texto qué palabras son complejas o poco comunes, y en el caso de que sí hubiera, proporcionar un sinónimo más usual y sencillo, junto con una definición sencilla, todo ello orientado a las personas con discapacidad cognitiva.Con tal meta, en esta Tesis, se presenta el estudio, análisis, diseño y desarrollo de una arquitectura, métodos PLN, recursos y herramientas para la simplificación léxica de textos para el idioma español en un dominio genérico en el ámbito de la accesibilidad cognitiva. Para lograr esto, se estudia cada uno de los pasos presentes en los procesos de simplificación léxica, junto con métodos para la desambiguación del sentido de las palabras. Como contribución, diferentes tipos de word embeddi...

show abstract

An Adaptable Lexical Simplification Architecture for Major Ibero-Romance Languages

Cited by 10 publications

References 12 publications

Lexical simplification benchmarks for English, Portuguese, and Spanish

Lexical simplification benchmarks for English, Portuguese, and Spanish

Lexical Simplification System to Improve Web Accessibility

Designing and Evaluating a User Interface for People with Cognitive Disabilities

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About