@inproceedings{degraeuwe-saggion-2022-lexical,
    title = "Lexical Simplification in Foreign Language Learning: Creating Pedagogically Suitable Simplified Example Sentences",
    author = "Degraeuwe, Jasper  and
      Saggion, Horacio",
    editor = "{\v{S}}tajner, Sanja  and
      Saggion, Horacio  and
      Ferr{\'e}s, Daniel  and
      Shardlow, Matthew  and
      Sheang, Kim Cheng  and
      North, Kai  and
      Zampieri, Marcos  and
      Xu, Wei",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability (TSAR-2022)",
    month = dec,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Virtual)",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2022.tsar-1.9/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.tsar-1.9",
    pages = "98--110",
    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."
}