CENTAL at TSAR-2022 Shared Task: How Does Context Impact BERT-Generated Substitutions for Lexical Simplification?

Rodrigo Wilkens, David Alfter, Rémi Cardon, Isabelle Gribomont, Adrien Bibal, Watrin Patrick, Marie-Catherine De marneffe, Thomas François


Abstract
Lexical simplification is the task of substituting a difficult word with a simpler equivalent for a target audience. This is currently commonly done by modeling lexical complexity on a continuous scale to identify simpler alternatives to difficult words. In the TSAR shared task, the organizers call for systems capable of generating substitutions in a zero-shot-task context, for English, Spanish and Portuguese. In this paper, we present the solution we (the cental team) proposed for the task. We explore the ability of BERT-like models to generate substitution words by masking the difficult word. To do so, we investigate various context enhancement strategies, that we combined into an ensemble method. We also explore different substitution ranking methods. We report on a post-submission analysis of the results and present our insights for potential improvements. The code for all our experiments is available at https://gitlab.com/Cental-FR/cental-tsar2022.
Anthology ID:
2022.tsar-1.25
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:
231–238
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.tsar-1.25
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.tsar-1.25
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rodrigo Wilkens, David Alfter, Rémi Cardon, Isabelle Gribomont, Adrien Bibal, Watrin Patrick, Marie-Catherine De marneffe, and Thomas François. 2022. CENTAL at TSAR-2022 Shared Task: How Does Context Impact BERT-Generated Substitutions for Lexical Simplification?. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability (TSAR-2022), pages 231–238, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Virtual). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CENTAL at TSAR-2022 Shared Task: How Does Context Impact BERT-Generated Substitutions for Lexical Simplification? (Wilkens et al., TSAR 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.tsar-1.25.pdf