Alejandro Mosquera at SemEval-2021 Task 1: Exploring Sentence and Word Features for Lexical Complexity Prediction

Abstract

This paper revisits feature engineering approaches for predicting the complexity level of English words in a particular context using regression techniques. Our best submission to the Lexical Complexity Prediction (LCP) shared task was ranked 3rd out of 48 systems for sub-task 1 and achieved Pearson correlation coefficients of 0.779 and 0.809 for single words and multi-word expressions respectively. The conclusion is that a combination of lexical, contextual and semantic features can still produce strong baselines when compared against human judgement.