Unsupervised Lexical Simplification with Context Augmentation

Takashi Wada, Timothy Baldwin, Jey Lau


Abstract
We propose a new unsupervised lexical simplification method that uses only monolingual data and pre-trained language models. Given a target word and its context, our method generates substitutes based on the target context and also additional contexts sampled from monolingual data. We conduct experiments in English, Portuguese, and Spanish on the TSAR-2022 shared task, and show that our model substantially outperforms other unsupervised systems across all languages. We also establish a new state-of-the-art by ensembling our model with GPT-3.5. Lastly, we evaluate our model on the SWORDS lexical substitution data set, achieving a state-of-the-art result.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.627
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9368–9379
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.627
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.627
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Takashi Wada, Timothy Baldwin, and Jey Lau. 2023. Unsupervised Lexical Simplification with Context Augmentation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 9368–9379, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Unsupervised Lexical Simplification with Context Augmentation (Wada et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-2024-clasp/2023.findings-emnlp.627.pdf