A Hybrid Model for Community-Oriented Lexical Simplification

Abstract

Generally, lexical simplification replaces complex words in a sentence with simplified and synonymous words. Most current methods improve lexical simplification by optimizing ranking algorithm and their performance are limited. This paper utilizes a hybrid model through merging candidate words generated by a Context2vec neural model and a Context-aware model based on a weighted average method. The model consists of four steps: candidate word generation, candidate word selection, candidate word ranking, and candidate word merging. Through the evaluation on standard datasets, our hybrid model outperforms a list of baseline methods including Context2vec method, Context-aware method, and the state-of-the-art semantic-context ranking method, indicating its effectiveness in community-oriented lexical simplification task.