Prospects for Lexical Simplification: Bibliometric Analysis and New Directions of Research

Abstract

This research investigates trends and advances in the field of Lexical Simplification (LS), namely efforts to simplify text. We used data from the Scopus database to see the types of publications that appeared most frequently. As a result, conference papers were the largest (65.6%), followed by journal articles and conference reviews. We also found that the number of publications fluctuated every year, with 2016 and 2020 being the peaks, indicating that there is a need to be more consistent and produce more publications in the future. This research also highlights the important contributions of several researchers and universities. From a language perspective, LS research mostly uses English, but some also uses Spanish and Mandarin. The main publication source is Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Keyword analysis shows that the main topics of this research are Lexical Simplification (18.34%), natural language processing systems (15.65%), computational linguistics (9.54%), semantics (7.85%), and Complex Word Identification (6.85%). These findings help understand the current state and future directions of LS research, emphasizing the importance of language variety and improving the quality of publications in this field.