FrenLyS: A Tool for the Automatic Simplification of French General Language Texts

Abstract

Lexical simplification (LS) aims at replacing words considered complex in a sentence by simpler equivalents. In this paper, we present the first automatic LS service for French, FrenLyS, which offers different techniques to generate, select and rank substitutes. The paper describes the different methods proposed by our tool, which includes both classical approaches (e.g. generation of candidates from lexical resources, frequency filter, etc.) and more innovative approaches such as the exploitation of CamemBERT, a model for French based on the RoBERTa architecture. To evaluate the different methods, a new evaluation dataset for French is introduced.