LEXenstein: A Framework for Lexical Simplification

Gustavo Paetzold, Lucia Specia

Abstract: Lexical Simplification consists in replacing complex words in a text with simpler alternatives. We introduce LEXenstein, the first open source framework for Lexical Simplification. It covers all major stages of the process and allows for easy benchmarking of various approaches. We test the tool’s performance and report comparisons on different datasets against the state of the art approaches. The results show that combining the novel Substitution Selection and Substitution Ranking approaches introduced in LEXenstein is the most effective approach to Lexical Simplification.