The BEA 2024 Shared Task on the Multilingual Lexical Simplification Pipeline

Matthew Shardlow, Fernando Alva-Manchego, Riza Batista-Navarro, Stefan Bott, Saul Calderon Ramirez, Rémi Cardon, Thomas François, Akio Hayakawa, Andrea Horbach, Anna Hülsing, Yusuke Ide, Joseph Marvin Imperial, Adam Nohejl, Kai North, Laura Occhipinti, Nelson Peréz Rojas, Nishat Raihan, Tharindu Ranasinghe, Martin Solis Salazar, Sanja Štajner, Marcos Zampieri, Horacio Saggion


Abstract
We report the findings of the 2024 Multilingual Lexical Simplification Pipeline shared task. We released a new dataset comprising 5,927 instances of lexical complexity prediction and lexical simplification on common contexts across 10 languages, split into trial (300) and test (5,627). 10 teams participated across 2 tracks and 10 languages with 233 runs evaluated across all systems. Five teams participated in all languages for the lexical complexity prediction task and 4 teams participated in all languages for the lexical simplification task. Teams employed a range of strategies, making use of open and closed source large language models for lexical simplification, as well as feature-based approaches for lexical complexity prediction. The highest scoring team on the combined multilingual data was able to obtain a Pearson’s correlation of 0.6241 and an ACC@1@Top1 of 0.3772, both demonstrating that there is still room for improvement on two difficult sub-tasks of the lexical simplification pipeline.
Anthology ID:
2024.bea-1.51
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2024)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Ekaterina Kochmar, Marie Bexte, Jill Burstein, Andrea Horbach, Ronja Laarmann-Quante, Anaïs Tack, Victoria Yaneva, Zheng Yuan
Venue:
BEA
SIG:
SIGEDU
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
571–589
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.bea-1.51
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Matthew Shardlow, Fernando Alva-Manchego, Riza Batista-Navarro, Stefan Bott, Saul Calderon Ramirez, Rémi Cardon, Thomas François, Akio Hayakawa, Andrea Horbach, Anna Hülsing, Yusuke Ide, Joseph Marvin Imperial, Adam Nohejl, Kai North, Laura Occhipinti, Nelson Peréz Rojas, Nishat Raihan, Tharindu Ranasinghe, Martin Solis Salazar, et al.. 2024. The BEA 2024 Shared Task on the Multilingual Lexical Simplification Pipeline. In Proceedings of the 19th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2024), pages 571–589, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The BEA 2024 Shared Task on the Multilingual Lexical Simplification Pipeline (Shardlow et al., BEA 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.bea-1.51.pdf