CASSA: A context-aware synonym simplification algorithm

Abstract

We present a new context-aware method for lexical simplification that uses two free language resources and real web frequencies. We compare it with the state-of-the-art method for lexical simplification in Spanish and the established simplification baseline, that is, the most frequent synonym. Our method improves upon the other methods in the detection of complex words, in meaning preservation, and in simplicity. Although we use Spanish, the method can be extended to other languages since it does not require alignment of parallel corpora.