Can Spanish Be Simpler? LexSiS: Lexical Simplification for Spanish

Lexical simplification is the task of replacing a word in a given context by an easier-to-understand synonym. Although a number of lexical simplification approaches have been developed in recent years, most of them have been applied to English, with recent work taking advantage of parallel monolingual datasets for training. Here we present LexSiS, a lexical simplification system for Spanish that does not require a parallel corpus, but instead relies on freely available resources, such as an on-line dictionary and the Web as a corpus. LexSiS uses three techniques for finding a suitable word substitute: a word vector model, word frequency, and word length. In experiments with human informants, we have verified that LexSiS performs better than a hard-to-beat baseline based on synonym frequency.