Papers › A Word-Complexity Lexicon and A Neural Readability Ranking Model for Lexical Simplification
A Word-Complexity Lexicon and A Neural Readability Ranking Model for Lexical Simplification
Mounica Maddela, Wei Xu
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).
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