Controllable Lexical Simplification for English

Kim Cheng Sheang, Daniel Ferrés, Horacio Saggion


Abstract
Fine-tuning Transformer-based approaches have recently shown exciting results on sentence simplification task. However, so far, no research has applied similar approaches to the Lexical Simplification (LS) task. In this paper, we present ConLS, a Controllable Lexical Simplification system fine-tuned with T5 (a Transformer-based model pre-trained with a BERT-style approach and several other tasks). The evaluation results on three datasets (LexMTurk, BenchLS, and NNSeval) have shown that our model performs comparable to LSBert (the current state-of-the-art) and even outperforms it in some cases. We also conducted a detailed comparison on the effectiveness of control tokens to give a clear view of how each token contributes to the model.
Anthology ID:
2022.tsar-1.19
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability (TSAR-2022)
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Virtual)
Editors:
Sanja Štajner, Horacio Saggion, Daniel Ferrés, Matthew Shardlow, Kim Cheng Sheang, Kai North, Marcos Zampieri, Wei Xu
Venue:
TSAR
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
199–206
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.tsar-1.19
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.tsar-1.19
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kim Cheng Sheang, Daniel Ferrés, and Horacio Saggion. 2022. Controllable Lexical Simplification for English. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability (TSAR-2022), pages 199–206, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Virtual). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Controllable Lexical Simplification for English (Sheang et al., TSAR 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.tsar-1.19.pdf