Visual Word Sense Disambiguation shared task at SemEval-2023 aims to identify an image corresponding to the intended meaning of a given ambiguous word (with related context) from a set of candidate images. The lack of textual description for the candidate image and the corresponding word’s ambiguity makes it a challenging problem. This paper describes teamPN’s multi-modal and modular approach to solving this in English track of the task. We efficiently used recent multi-modal pre-trained models backed by real-time multi-modal knowledge graphs to augment textual knowledge for the images and select the best matching image accordingly. We outperformed the baseline model by ~5 points and proposed a unique approach that can further work as a framework for other modular and knowledge-backed solutions.

Lexical Simplification is the process of reducing the lexical complexity of a text by replacing difficult words with easier-to-read (or understand) expressions while preserving the original information and meaning. This paper explains the work done by our team “teamPN” for the English track of TSAR 2022 Shared Task of Lexical Simplification. We created a modular pipeline which combines transformers based models with traditional NLP methods like paraphrasing and verb sense disambiguation. We created a multi-level and modular pipeline where the target text is treated according to its semantics (Part of Speech Tag). The pipeline is multi-level as we utilize multiple source models to find potential candidates for replacement. It is modular as we can switch the source models and their weighting in the final re-ranking.