Word Complexity is in the Eye of the Beholder

Sian Gooding, Ekaterina Kochmar, Seid Muhie Yimam, Chris Biemann


Abstract
Lexical complexity is a highly subjective notion, yet this factor is often neglected in lexical simplification and readability systems which use a ”one-size-fits-all” approach. In this paper, we investigate which aspects contribute to the notion of lexical complexity in various groups of readers, focusing on native and non-native speakers of English, and how the notion of complexity changes depending on the proficiency level of a non-native reader. To facilitate reproducibility of our approach and foster further research into these aspects, we release a dataset of complex words annotated by readers with different backgrounds.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.351
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4439–4449
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.351
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.351
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sian Gooding, Ekaterina Kochmar, Seid Muhie Yimam, and Chris Biemann. 2021. Word Complexity is in the Eye of the Beholder. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 4439–4449, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Word Complexity is in the Eye of the Beholder (Gooding et al., NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.351.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.351.mp4