# Enhancing Pre-trained Language Model with Lexical Simplification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.15070 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15070/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Dec 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Prompt-Learning for Short Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11345/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

For both human readers and pre-trained language models (PrLMs), lexical diversity may lead to confusion and inaccuracy when understanding the underlying semantic meanings of given sentences. By substituting complex words with simple alternatives, lexical simplification (LS) is a recognized method to reduce such lexical diversity, and therefore to improve the understandability of sentences. In this paper, we leverage LS and propose a novel approach which can effectively improve the performance of PrLMs in text classification. A rule-based simplification process is applied to a given sentence. PrLMs are encouraged to predict the real label of the given sentence with auxiliary inputs from the simplified version. Using strong PrLMs (BERT and ELECTRA) as baselines, our approach can still further improve the performance in various text classification tasks.