CS-UM6P at SemEval-2021 Task 1: A Deep Learning Model-based Pre-trained Transformer Encoder for Lexical Complexity

Lexical Complexity Prediction (LCP) involves assigning a difficulty score to a particular word or expression, in a text intended for a target audience. In this paper, we introduce a new deep learning-based system for this challenging task. The proposed system consists of a deep learning model, based on pre-trained transformer encoder, for word and Multi-Word Expression (MWE) complexity prediction. First, on top of the encoder's contextualized word embedding, our model employs an attention layer on the input context and the complex word or MWE. Then, the attention output is concatenated with the pooled output of the encoder and passed to a regression module. We investigate both single-task and joint training on both Sub-Tasks data using multiple pre-trained transformer-based encoders. The obtained results are very promising and show the effectiveness of fine-tuning pre-trained transformers for LCP task.

Cambridge at SemEval-2021 Task 1: An Ensemble of Feature-Based and Neural Models for Lexical Complexity Prediction

This paper describes our submission to the SemEval-2021 shared task on Lexical Complexity Prediction. We approached it as a regression problem and present an ensemble combining four systems, one feature-based and three neural with fine-tuning, frequency pre-training and multi-task learning, achieving Pearson scores of 0.8264 and 0.7556 on the trial and test sets respectively (sub-task 1). We further present our analysis of the results and discuss our findings.