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Lexical simplification, the process of simplifying complex content in text without any modifications to the syntactical structure of text, plays a crucial role in enhancing comprehension and accessibility. This paper presents an approach to lexical simplification that relies on the capabilities of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) models to predict the complexity of words and substitute complex words with simpler alternatives. Early lexical simplification methods predominantly relied on rule-based approaches, transitioning gradually to machine learning and deep learning techniques, leveraging contextual embeddings from large language models. However, the the emergence of generative AI models revolutionized the landscape of natural language processing, including lexical simplification. In this study, we proposed a straightforward yet effective method that employs generative AI models for both predicting lexical complexity and generating appropriate substitutions. To predict lexical complexity, we adopted three distinct types of prompt templates, while for lexical substitution, we employed three prompt templates alongside an ensemble approach. Extending our experimentation to include both English and Sinhala data, our approach demonstrated comparable performance across both languages, with particular strengths in lexical substitution.

NAACL 2024

ANU at MLSP-2024: Prompt-based Lexical Simplification for English and Sinhala

prompt engineering

lexical complexity prediction

lexical simplification

lexical substitution

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2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Lexical substitute generation is a task where we generate substitutes for a given word to fit in the required context. It is one of the main steps for automatic lexical simplifcation. In this paper, we introduce an automatic lexical simplification system using the GPT-3 large language model. The system generates simplified candidate substitutions for complex words to aid readability and comprehension for the reader. The paper describes the system that we submitted for the Multilingual Lexical Simplification Pipeline Shared Task at the 2024 BEA Workshop. During the shared task, we experimented with Catalan, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and German for the Lexical Simplification Shared Task. We achieved the best results in Catalan and Portuguese, and were runners-up in English, French and Italian. To further research in this domain, we also release our code upon acceptance of the paper.

ISEP_Presidency_University at MLSP 2024 Shared Task: Using GPT-3.5 to Generate Substitutes for Lexical Simplification

We present the submissions of team Archaeology for the Lexical Simplification and Lexical Complexity Prediction Shared Tasks at BEA2024. Our approach for this shared task consists in creating two pipelines for generating lexical substitutions and estimating the complexity: one using machine translation texts into English and one using the original language.
For the LCP subtask, our xgb regressor is trained with engineered features (based primarily on English language resources) and shallow word structure features. For the LS subtask we use a locally-executed quantized LLM to generate candidates and sort them by complexity score computed using the pipeline designed for LCP.
These pipelines provide distinct perspectives on the lexical simplification process, offering insights into the efficacy and limitations of employing Machine Translation versus direct processing on the original language data.

Machine Translation for Lexical Complexity Prediction and Lexical Simplification

In this paper we present the participation of the RETUYT-INCO team at the BEA-MLSP 2024 shared task. 
We followed different approaches, from Multilayer Perceptron models with word embeddings to Large Language Models fine-tuned on different datasets: already existing, crowd-annotated, and synthetic.
Our best models are based on fine-tuning Mistral-7B, either with a manually annotated dataset or with synthetic data.

RETUYT-INCO at MLSP 2024: Experiments on Language Simplification using Embeddings, Classifiers and Large Language Models

This paper presents GMU's submission to the Multilingual Lexical Simplification Pipeline (MLSP) shared task at the BEA workshop 2024. The task includes Lexical Complexity Prediction (LCP) and Lexical Simplification (LS) sub-tasks across 10 languages. Our submissions achieved rankings ranging from 1st to 5th in LCP and from 1st to 3rd in LS. Our best performing approach for LCP is a weighted ensemble based on Pearson correlation of language specific transformer models trained on all languages combined. For LS, GPT4-turbo zero-shot prompting achieved the best performance.

GMU at MLSP 2024: Multilingual Lexical Simplification with Transformer Models

This paper presents the results of our team's participation in the BEA 2024 shared task on the multilingual lexical simplification pipeline (MLSP; Shardlow et al., 2024). During the task, organizers supplied data that combined two components of the simplification pipeline: lexical complexity prediction and lexical substitution. This dataset encompassed ten languages, including French. Given the absence of dedicated training data, teams were challenged with employing systems trained on pre-existing resources and evaluating their performance on unexplored test data.

Our team contributed to the task using previously developed models for predicting lexical difficulty in French (Tack, 2021). These models were built on deep learning architectures, adding to our participation in the CWI 2018 shared task (De Hertog and Tack, 2018). The training dataset comprised 262,054 binary decision annotations, capturing perceived lexical difficulty, collected from a sample of 56 non-native French readers. Two pre-trained neural logistic models were used: (1) a model for predicting difficulty for words within their sentence context, and (2) a model for predicting difficulty for isolated words.

The findings revealed that despite being trained for a distinct prediction task (as indicated by a negative R2 fit), transferring the logistic predictions of lexical difficulty to continuous scores of lexical complexity exhibited a positive correlation. Specifically, the results indicated that isolated predictions exhibited a higher correlation (r = .36) compared to contextualized predictions (r = .33). Moreover, isolated predictions demonstrated a remarkably higher Spearman rank correlation (ρ = .50) than contextualized predictions (ρ = .35). These results align with earlier observations by Tack (2021), suggesting that the ground truth primarily captures more lexical access difficulties than word-to-context integration problems.

ITEC at MLSP 2024: Transferring Predictions of Lexical Difficulty from Non-Native Readers

This paper summarizes our methodology and results for the BEA 2024 Shared Task. This competition focused on predicting item difficulty and response time for retired multiple-choice items from the United States Medical Licensing Examination® (USMLE®). We extracted linguistic features from the item stem and response options using multiple methods, including the BiomedBERT model, FastText embeddings, and Coh-Metrix. The extracted features were combined with additional features available in item metadata (e.g., item type) to predict item difficulty and average response time. The results showed that the BiomedBERT model was the most effective in predicting item difficulty, while the fine-tuned model based on FastText word embeddings was the best model for predicting response time.

Item Difficulty and Response Time Prediction with Large Language Models: An Empirical Analysis of USMLE Items

This paper presents our system developed for the Shared Task on Automated Prediction of Item Difficulty and Item Response Time for USMLE questions, organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Special Interest Group for building Educational Applications (BEA SIGEDU). The Shared Task, held as a workshop at the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) 2024 conference, aimed to advance the state-of-the-art in predicting item characteristics directly from item text, with implications for the fairness and validity of standardized exams. We compared various methods ranging from BERT for regression to Random forest, Gradient Boosting(GB), Linear Regression, Support Vector Regressor (SVR), k-nearest neighbours (KNN) Regressor, MultiLayer Perceptron(MLP) to custom-ANN using BioBERT and Word2Vec embeddings and provided inferences on which performed better. This paper also explains the importance of data augmentation to balance the data in order to get better results. We also proposed five hypotheses regarding factors impacting difficulty and response time for a question and also verified it thereby helping researchers to derive meaningful numerical attributes for accurate prediction. We achieved a RSME score of 0.315 for Difficulty prediction and 26.945 for Response Time.

Leveraging Physical and Semantic Features of text item for Difficulty and Response Time Prediction of USMLE Questions

This work presents a novel framework for the automated prediction of item difficulty and response time within educational assessments. Utilizing data from the BEA 2024 Shared Task, we integrate Named Entity Recognition, Semantic Role Labeling, and linguistic features to prompt a Large Language Model (LLM). Our best approach achieves an RMSE of 0.308 for item difficulty and 27.474 for response time prediction, improving on the provided baseline. The framework's adaptability is demonstrated on audio recordings of 3rd-8th graders from the Atlanta, Georgia area responding to the Test of Narrative Language. These results highlight the framework's potential to enhance test development efficiency.

Large Language Model-based Pipeline for Item Difficulty and Response Time Estimation for Educational Assessments

In this paper, we present an approach for solving SemEval-2024 Task 3: The Competition of Multimodal Emotion Cause Analysis in Conversations. The task includes two subtasks that focus on emotion-cause pair extraction using text, video, and audio modalities. Our approach is composed of encoding all modalities (MFCC and Wav2Vec for audio, 3D-CNN for video, and transformer-based models for text) and combining them in an utterance-level fusion module. The model is then optimized for link and emotion prediction simultaneously. Our approach achieved 6th place in both subtasks. The full leaderboard can be found at \url{https://codalab.lisn.upsaclay.fr/competitions/16141#results}.

UWBA at SemEval-2024 Task 3: Dialogue Representation and Multimodal Fusion for Emotion Cause Analysis

Hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) have recently become a significant problem. A recent effort in this direction is a shared task at Semeval 2024 Task 6, SHROOM, a Shared-task on Hallucinations and Related Observable Overgeneration Mistakes (Mickus et al., 2024). This paper describes our winning solution ranked 1st and 2nd in the 2 sub-tasks of model agnostic and model aware tracks respectively. We propose a metaregressor framework of LLMs for model evaluation and integration that achieves the highest scores on the leader board. We also experiment with various transformer based models and black box methods like ChatGPT, Vectara, and others. In addition, we perform an error analysis comparing GPT3.5 against our best model which shows the limitations of the former.

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ISEP_Presidency_University at MLSP 2024 Shared Task: Using GPT-3.5 to Generate Substitutes for Lexical Simplification

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