A Word-Complexity Lexicon and A Neural Readability Ranking Model for Lexical Simplification
Mounica Maddela, Wei Hong Xu · 2018
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 wordcomplexity 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). 1