Understanding the Lexical Simplification Needs of Non-Native Speakers of English

Gustavo Paetzold, Lucia Specia


Abstract
We report three user studies in which the Lexical Simplification needs of non-native English speakers are investigated. Our analyses feature valuable new insight on the relationship between the non-natives’ notion of complexity and various morphological, semantic and lexical word properties. Some of our findings contradict long-standing misconceptions about word simplicity. The data produced in our studies consists of 211,564 annotations made by 1,100 volunteers, which we hope will guide forthcoming research on Text Simplification for non-native speakers of English.
Anthology ID:
C16-1069
Volume:
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editors:
Yuji Matsumoto, Rashmi Prasad
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
717–727
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-1069
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Gustavo Paetzold and Lucia Specia. 2016. Understanding the Lexical Simplification Needs of Non-Native Speakers of English. In Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers, pages 717–727, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
Understanding the Lexical Simplification Needs of Non-Native Speakers of English (Paetzold & Specia, COLING 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-1069.pdf