SimpleScience: Lexical Simplification of Scientific Terminology

Abstract

Lexical simplification of scientific terms represents a unique challenge due to the lack of a standard parallel corpora and fast rate at which vocabulary shift along with research. We introduce SimpleScience, a lexical simplifica-tion approach for scientific terminology. We use word embeddings to extract simplification rules from a parallel corpora containing sci-entific publications and Wikipedia. To evaluate our system we construct SimpleSciGold, a novel gold standard set for science-related simplifications. We find that our approach out-performs prior context-aware approaches at generating simplifications for scientific terms.