Cette étude s’intéresse à la prédiction de la complexité lexicale. Nous explorons des méthodesd’apprentissage profond afin d’évaluer la complexité d’un mot en se basant sur son contexte. Plusspécifiquement, nous examinons comment utiliser des modèles de langue pré-entraînés pour encoderle mot cible et son contexte, en les combinant avec des caractéristiques supplémentaires basées sur lafréquence. Notre approche obtient de meilleurs résultats que les meilleurs systèmes de SemEval-2021(Shardlow et al., 2021). Enfin, nous menons une étude comparative avec ChatGPT afin d’évaluer sonpotentiel pour prédire la complexité lexicale en comparaison avec un modèle dédié à cette tâche.

There are several works in natural language processing for identifying lexical complexity. This can be for various reasons, either for simplification, the selection of more suitable content, or for other specific tasks. Words can have multiple definitions and degrees of complexity depending on the context in which they appear. One solution being investigated is lexical complexity prediction, where computational methods are used to evaluate the difficulty of vocabulary for language learners and offer personalized assistance. In this work, we explore deep learning methods to assess the complexity of a word based on its context. Specifically, we investigate how to use pre-trained language models to encode both the sentence and the target word, and then fine-tune them by combining them with additional frequency-based features. Our approach achieved superior results compared to the best systems in SemEval-2021 (Shardlow et al., 2021), as demonstrated by an R2 score of 0.65. Finally, we carry out a comparative study with ChatGPT to assess its potential for predicting lexical complexity, to see whether prompt engineering can be an alternative to this task, we will discuss the advantages and limitations of ChatGPT.