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

TL;DR

This paper explores unsupervised methods for extracting lexical simplifications from Simple English Wikipedia edit histories, aiming to improve automatic simplification resources by identifying high-quality simplifications without manual annotation.

Contribution

It introduces two novel unsupervised approaches leveraging edit histories and metadata to identify lexical simplifications, outperforming baseline methods.

Findings

Methods outperform baseline in extracting simplifications

Generated list includes many high-quality, previously unlisted simplifications

Approaches effectively utilize edit probabilities and metadata

Abstract

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.