For the sake of simplicity: Unsupervised extraction of lexical simplifications from Wikipedia

We report on work in progress on extracting lexical simplifications (e.g., "collaborate" "work together"), focusing on utilizing edit histories in Simple English Wikipedia for this task. We consider two main approaches: (1) deriving simplification probabilities via an edit model that accounts for a mixture of different operations, and (2) using metadata to focus on edits that are more likely to be simplification operations. We find our methods to outperform a reasonable baseline and yield many high-quality lexical simplifications not included in an independently-created manually prepared list. Published at: NAACL 2010 (short paper)

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Mark Yatskar, Bo Pang, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Lillian Lee
• Keywords: CORR 2010, Education, Lexical Simplifications, Simple English Wikipedia, Simplification Probabilities