# Multilingual Controllable Transformer-Based Lexical Simplification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.02120 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02120/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Optuna: A Next-generation Hyperparameter Optimization Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10902/) (2019)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [Making Monolingual Sentence Embeddings Multilingual using Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09813/) (2020)
- [Controllable Sentence Simplification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02677/) (2019)
- [Controllable Text Simplification with Explicit Paraphrasing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11004/) (2020)
- [CompLex: A New Corpus for Lexical Complexity Prediction from Likert Scale Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07008/) (2020)
- [Findings of the TSAR-2022 Shared Task on Multilingual Lexical Simplification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02888/) (2023)
- [UniHD at TSAR-2022 Shared Task: Is Compute All We Need for Lexical Simplification?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01764/) (2023)
- [MANTIS at TSAR-2022 Shared Task: Improved Unsupervised Lexical Simplification with Pretrained Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09855/) (2022)
- [Controllable Lexical Simplification for English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02900/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [RALS: Resources and Baselines for Romanian Automatic Lexical Simplification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.20078/) (2026)
- [Text Adaptation to Plain Language and Easy Read via Automatic Post-Editing Cycles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11991/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text is by far the most ubiquitous source of knowledge and information and should be made easily accessible to as many people as possible; however, texts often contain complex words that hinder reading comprehension and accessibility. Therefore, suggesting simpler alternatives for complex words without compromising meaning would help convey the information to a broader audience. This paper proposes mTLS, a multilingual controllable Transformer-based Lexical Simplification (LS) system fined-tuned with the T5 model. The novelty of this work lies in the use of language-specific prefixes, control tokens, and candidates extracted from pre-trained masked language models to learn simpler alternatives for complex words. The evaluation results on three well-known LS datasets -- LexMTurk, BenchLS, and NNSEval -- show that our model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art models like LSBert and ConLS. Moreover, further evaluation of our approach on the part of the recent TSAR-2022 multilingual LS shared-task dataset shows that our model performs competitively when compared with the participating systems for English LS and even outperforms the GPT-3 model on several metrics. Moreover, our model obtains performance gains also for Spanish and Portuguese.