Kong Cunliang


2023

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Lexical Complexity Controlled Sentence Generation for Language Learning
Nie Jinran | Yang Liner | Chen Yun | Kong Cunliang | Zhu Junhui | Yang Erhong
Proceedings of the 22nd Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics

“Language teachers spend a lot of time developing good examples for language learners. For this reason, we define a new task for language learning, lexical complexity controlledsentence generation, which requires precise control over the lexical complexity in thekeywords to examples generation and better fluency and semantic consistency. The chal-lenge of this task is to generate fluent sentences only using words of given complexitylevels. We propose a simple but effective approach for this task based on complexityembedding while controlling sentence length and syntactic complexity at the decodingstage. Compared with potential solutions, our approach fuses the representations of theword complexity levels into the model to get better control of lexical complexity. Andwe demonstrate the feasibility of the approach for both training models from scratch andfine-tuning the pre-trained models. To facilitate the research, we develop two datasetsin English and Chinese respectively, on which extensive experiments are conducted. Ex-perimental results show that our approach provides more precise control over lexicalcomplexity, as well as better fluency and diversity.”