CASSA: A Context-Aware Synonym Simplification Algorithm

Abstract

We present a new context-aware method for lexical simplification that uses two free language resources and real web frequencies. We compare it with the state-of-the-art method for lexical simplification in Spanish and the established simplification baseline, that is, the most frequent synonym. Our method improves upon the other methods in the detection of complex words, in meaning preservation, and in simplicity. Although we use Spanish, the method can be extended to other languages since it does not require alignment of parallel corpora.

Emerging Technology Enabling Dyslexia Users To Read and Perceive Written Text Correctly

“…But the same advice is true for adults -training is the only option to help improve reading. There were several attempts to use technologies for other impairments, for instance text to speech systems and screen readers [13], and also attempts to develop technology aimed at dyslexia. For web page reading, it is especially Fox Replace, the extension for Mozilla browser, Text4All web service and CASSA, the algorithm for simplifying sentences by using synonyms.…”

“…This extension for Chrome was meant to be a method that generates more simple synonyms of problematic words based on the context of the sentence. The database of synonyms was taken from Google Books N-gram Corpus and Open Thesaurus and presented in [13]. Authors argue that the extension, due to language mutations of the Corpus and Thesaurus, is easily transferable to other languages.…”

An Adaptable Lexical Simplification Architecture for Major Ibero-Romance Languages

“…In general Lexical Simplification systems do not deal with Morphological Generation, for example CASSA (Baeza-Yates et al, 2015) has not morphological realization component, LexSiS morphological realization (Bott et al, 2012) is limited to a dictionary and set of handcrafted rules. Simplification systems based on machine translation (Specia, 2010;Stajner, 2014) generate words based on parallel/comparable original and simplified datasets being therefor limited in coverage (e.g.…”

“…• Baeza- Yates et al (2015) presented CASSA a lexical simplifier for Spanish. CASSA uses the Google Books Ngram Corpus to find the frequency of target words and its contexts and uses this information for disambiguation.…”

A plug-in to aid online reading in Spanish

“…First, for the synonyms on-demand, the plug-in parses the Span ish web text and verifies if a word within their context (4 words, 2 on the right and 2 on the left), is a complex word. For this step the plug-in uses the CASSA resource generated by CASSA (Context Aware Synonym Simplification Algo rithm) [3]. This algorithm makes use of two free resources to find simpler synonyms: Google Books Ngram Corpus for Spanish and the Spanish OpenThesaurus.…”