@inproceedings{maddela-xu-2018-word,
    title = "A Word-Complexity Lexicon and A Neural Readability Ranking Model for Lexical Simplification",
    author = "Maddela, Mounica  and
      Xu, Wei",
    editor = "Riloff, Ellen  and
      Chiang, David  and
      Hockenmaier, Julia  and
      Tsujii, Jun{'}ichi",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = oct # "-" # nov,
    year = "2018",
    address = "Brussels, Belgium",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/D18-1410/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/D18-1410",
    pages = "3749--3760",
    abstract = "Current lexical simplification approaches rely heavily on heuristics and corpus level features that do not always align with human judgment. We create a human-rated word-complexity lexicon of 15,000 English words and propose a novel neural readability ranking model with a Gaussian-based feature vectorization layer that utilizes these human ratings to measure the complexity of any given word or phrase. Our model performs better than the state-of-the-art systems for different lexical simplification tasks and evaluation datasets. Additionally, we also produce SimplePPDB++, a lexical resource of over 10 million simplifying paraphrase rules, by applying our model to the Paraphrase Database (PPDB)."
}