Abstract
This study presents a lexical simplification (LS) methodology for foreign language (FL) learning purposes, a barely explored area of automatic text simplification (TS). The method, targeted at Spanish as a foreign language (SFL), includes a customised complex word identification (CWI) classifier and generates substitutions based on masked language modelling. Performance is calculated on a custom dataset by means of a new, pedagogically-oriented evaluation. With 43% of the top simplifications being found suitable, the method shows potential for simplifying sentences to be used in FL learning activities. The evaluation also suggests that, though still crucial, meaning preservation is not always a prerequisite for successful LS. To arrive at grammatically correct and more idiomatic simplifications, future research could study the integration of association measures based on co-occurrence data.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.tsar-1.9
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability (TSAR-2022)
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Virtual)
- Editors:
- Sanja Štajner, Horacio Saggion, Daniel Ferrés, Matthew Shardlow, Kim Cheng Sheang, Kai North, Marcos Zampieri, Wei Xu
- Venue:
- TSAR
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 98–110
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.tsar-1.9
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2022.tsar-1.9
- Cite (ACL):
- Jasper Degraeuwe and Horacio Saggion. 2022. Lexical Simplification in Foreign Language Learning: Creating Pedagogically Suitable Simplified Example Sentences. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability (TSAR-2022), pages 98–110, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Virtual). Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Lexical Simplification in Foreign Language Learning: Creating Pedagogically Suitable Simplified Example Sentences (Degraeuwe & Saggion, TSAR 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2022.tsar-1.9.pdf