Investigating Large Language Models for Complex Word Identification in Multilingual and Multidomain Setups

Răzvan-Alexandru Smădu, David-Gabriel Ion, Dumitru-Clementin Cercel, Florin Pop, Mihaela-Claudia Cercel


Abstract
Complex Word Identification (CWI) is an essential step in the lexical simplification task and has recently become a task on its own. Some variations of this binary classification task have emerged, such as lexical complexity prediction (LCP) and complexity evaluation of multi-word expressions (MWE). Large language models (LLMs) recently became popular in the Natural Language Processing community because of their versatility and capability to solve unseen tasks in zero/few-shot settings. Our work investigates LLM usage, specifically open-source models such as Llama 2, Llama 3, and Vicuna v1.5, and closed-source, such as ChatGPT-3.5-turbo and GPT-4o, in the CWI, LCP, and MWE settings. We evaluate zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning settings and show that LLMs struggle in certain conditions or achieve comparable results against existing methods. In addition, we provide some views on meta-learning combined with prompt learning. In the end, we conclude that the current state of LLMs cannot or barely outperform existing methods, which are usually much smaller.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.933
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
16764–16800
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.933
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Răzvan-Alexandru Smădu, David-Gabriel Ion, Dumitru-Clementin Cercel, Florin Pop, and Mihaela-Claudia Cercel. 2024. Investigating Large Language Models for Complex Word Identification in Multilingual and Multidomain Setups. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 16764–16800, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Investigating Large Language Models for Complex Word Identification in Multilingual and Multidomain Setups (Smădu et al., EMNLP 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.933.pdf