New Evaluation Paradigm for Lexical Simplification

Lexical Simplification (LS) methods use a three-step pipeline: complex word identification, substitute generation, and substitute ranking, each with separate evaluation datasets. We found large language models (LLMs) can simplify sentences directly with a single prompt, bypassing the traditional pipeline. However, existing LS datasets are not suitable for evaluating these LLM-generated simplified sentences, as they focus on providing substitutes for single complex words without identifying all complex words in a sentence. To address this gap, we propose a new annotation method for constructing an all-in-one LS dataset through human-machine collaboration. Automated methods generate a pool of potential substitutes, which human annotators then assess, suggesting additional alternatives as needed. Additionally, we explore LLM-based methods with single prompts, in-context learning, and chain-of-thought techniques. We introduce a multi-LLMs collaboration approach to simulate each step of the LS task. Experimental results demonstrate that LS based on multi-LLMs approaches significantly outperforms existing baselines.

Chinese Idiom Paraphrasing

Idioms, are a kind of idiomatic expression in Chinese, most of which consist of four Chinese characters. Due to the properties of non-compositionality and metaphorical meaning, Chinese Idioms are hard to be understood by children and non-native speakers. This study proposes a novel task, denoted as Chinese Idiom Paraphrasing (CIP). CIP aims to rephrase idioms-included sentences to non-idiomatic ones under the premise of preserving the original sentence's meaning. Since the sentences without idioms are easier handled by Chinese NLP systems, CIP can be used to pre-process Chinese datasets, thereby facilitating and improving the performance of Chinese NLP tasks, e.g., machine translation system, Chinese idiom cloze, and Chinese idiom embeddings. In this study, CIP task is treated as a special paraphrase generation task. To circumvent difficulties in acquiring annotations, we first establish a large-scale CIP dataset based on human and machine collaboration, which consists of 115,530 sentence pairs. We further deploy three baselines and two novel CIP approaches to deal with CIP problems. The results show that the proposed methods have better performances than the baselines based on the established CIP dataset.