Strong Baselines for Complex Word Identification across Multiple Languages

Pierre Finnimore, Elisabeth Fritzsch, Daniel King, Alison Sneyd, Aneeq Ur Rehman, Fernando Alva-Manchego, Andreas Vlachos


Abstract
Complex Word Identification (CWI) is the task of identifying which words or phrases in a sentence are difficult to understand by a target audience. The latest CWI Shared Task released data for two settings: monolingual (i.e. train and test in the same language) and cross-lingual (i.e. test in a language not seen during training). The best monolingual models relied on language-dependent features, which do not generalise in the cross-lingual setting, while the best cross-lingual model used neural networks with multi-task learning. In this paper, we present monolingual and cross-lingual CWI models that perform as well as (or better than) most models submitted to the latest CWI Shared Task. We show that carefully selected features and simple learning models can achieve state-of-the-art performance, and result in strong baselines for future development in this area. Finally, we discuss how inconsistencies in the annotation of the data can explain some of the results obtained.
Anthology ID:
N19-1102
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
970–977
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1102
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1102
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pierre Finnimore, Elisabeth Fritzsch, Daniel King, Alison Sneyd, Aneeq Ur Rehman, Fernando Alva-Manchego, and Andreas Vlachos. 2019. Strong Baselines for Complex Word Identification across Multiple Languages. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 970–977, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Strong Baselines for Complex Word Identification across Multiple Languages (Finnimore et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1102.pdf
Code
 sheffieldnlp/cwi