Semeval-2012 Task 1: English Lexical Simplification

We describe the English Lexical Simplification task at SemEval-2012. This is the first time such a shared task has been organized and its goal is to provide a framework for the evaluation of systems for lexical simplification and foster research on context-aware lexical simplification approaches. The task requires that annotators and systems rank a number of alternative substitutes – all deemed adequate – for a target word in context, according to how “simple” these substitutes are. The notion of simplicity is biased towards non-native speakers of English. Out of nine participating systems, the best scoring ones combine context-dependent and context-independent information, with the strongest individual contribution given by the frequency of the substitute regardless of its context.