GPT-Based Lexical Simplification for Multi-Word Expressions Using Prompt Engineering

Sardar Khan Khayamkhani, Matthew Shardlow


Abstract
Multiword Lexical Simplification (MWLS) is the task of replacing a complex phrase in a sentence with a simpler alternative. Whereas previous approaches to MWLS made use of the BERT language model, we make use of the Generative Pre-trained Transformer architecture. Our approach employs Large Language Models in an auto-regressive format, making use of prompt engineering and few-shot learning to develop new strategies for the MWLS task. We experiment with several GPT-based models and differing experimental settings including varying the number of requested examples, changing the base model type, adapting the prompt and zero-shot, one-shot and k-shot in-context learning. We show that a GPT-4o model with k-shot in-context learning (k=6) demonstrates state-of-the-art performance for the MWLS1 dataset with NDCG=0.3143, PREC@5=0.1048, beating the previous Bert-based approach by a wide margin on several metrics and consistently across subsets. Our findings indicate that GPT-based models are superior to BERT-based models for the MWLS task.
Anthology ID:
2025.ranlp-1.64
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing - Natural Language Processing in the Generative AI Era
Month:
September
Year:
2025
Address:
Varna, Bulgaria
Editors:
Galia Angelova, Maria Kunilovskaya, Marie Escribe, Ruslan Mitkov
Venue:
RANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
Note:
Pages:
546–556
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.ranlp-1.64/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sardar Khan Khayamkhani and Matthew Shardlow. 2025. GPT-Based Lexical Simplification for Multi-Word Expressions Using Prompt Engineering. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing - Natural Language Processing in the Generative AI Era, pages 546–556, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria.
Cite (Informal):
GPT-Based Lexical Simplification for Multi-Word Expressions Using Prompt Engineering (Khayamkhani & Shardlow, RANLP 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.ranlp-1.64.pdf