PolyU-CBS at TSAR-2022 Shared Task: A Simple, Rank-Based Method for Complex Word Substitution in Two Steps
Emmanuele Chersoni, Yu-Yin Hsu · 2022
In this paper, we describe the system we present at the Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability (TSAR-2022) regarding the shared task on Lexical Simplification for English, Portuguese, and Spanish.We proposed an unsupervised approach in two steps: First, we used a masked language model with word masking for each language to extract possible candidates for the replacement of a difficult word; second, we ranked the candidates according to three different Transformer-based metrics.Finally, we determined our list of candidates based on the lowest average rank across different metrics.The results show that our method, based on two simple steps and rankings, can effectively improve the scores among datasets for the task of lexical simplification.