In this paper we describe our participation in the Lexical Complexity Prediction (LCP) shared task of SemEval 2021, which involved predicting subjective ratings of complexity for English single words and multi-word expressions, presented in context.
Our approach relies on a combination of distributional models, both context-dependent and context-independent, together with behavioural norms and lexical resources.
Predicting the complexity level of a word or a phrase is considered a challenging task. It is even recognized as a crucial step in numerous NLP applications, such as text rearrangements and text simplification. Early research treated the task as a bi
nary classification task, where the systems anticipated the existence of a word's complexity (complex versus uncomplicated). Other studies had been designed to assess the level of word complexity using regression models or multi-labeling classification models. Deep learning models show a significant improvement over machine learning models with the rise of transfer learning and pre-trained language models. This paper presents our approach that won the first rank in the SemEval-task1 (sub stask1). We have calculated the degree of word complexity from 0-1 within a text. We have been ranked first place in the competition using the pre-trained language models Bert and RoBERTa, with a Pearson correlation score of 0.788.
This paper describes a system submitted by team BigGreen to LCP 2021 for predicting the lexical complexity of English words in a given context. We assemble a feature engineering-based model with a deep neural network model founded on BERT. While BERT
itself performs competitively, our feature engineering-based model helps in extreme cases, eg. separating instances of easy and neutral difficulty. Our handcrafted features comprise a breadth of lexical, semantic, syntactic, and novel phonological measures. Visualizations of BERT attention maps offer insight into potential features that Transformers models may learn when fine-tuned for lexical complexity prediction. Our ensembled predictions score reasonably well for the single word subtask, and we demonstrate how they can be harnessed to perform well on the multi word expression subtask too.
