Multilingual Lexical Simplification via Paraphrase Generation
Kang Liu Jipeng Qiang Yun Li Yunhao Yuan Yi Zhu Kaixun Hua
Lexical simplification (LS) methods based on pretrained language models have
made remarkable progress, generating potential substitutes for a complex word
through analysis of its contextual surroundings. However, these methods require
separate pretrained models for different languages and disregard the
preservation of sentence meaning. In this paper, we propose a novel
multilingual LS method via paraphrase generation, as paraphrases provide
diversity in word selection while preserving the sentence's meaning. We regard
paraphrasing as a zero-shot translation task within multilingual neural machine
translation that supports hundreds of languages. After feeding the input
sentence into the encoder of paraphrase modeling, we generate the substitutes
based on a novel decoding strategy that concentrates solely on the lexical
variations of the complex word. Experimental results demonstrate that our
approach surpasses BERT-based methods and zero-shot GPT3-based method
significantly on English, Spanish, and Portuguese.