# Investigating Large Language Models for Complex Word Identification in Multilingual and Multidomain Setups

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.01706 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01706/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04615/) (2022)
- [Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12837/) (2022)
- [On First-Order Meta-Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02999/) (2018)
- [A Report on the Complex Word Identification Shared Task 2018](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09132/) (2018)
- [SemEval-2021 Task 1: Lexical Complexity Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00473/) (2021)
- [MetaPrompting: Learning to Learn Better Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11486/) (2022)
- [Self-supervised Meta-Prompt Learning with Meta-Gradient Regularization for Few-shot Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12314/) (2023)
- [Strong Baselines for Complex Word Identification across Multiple Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05953/) (2019)
- [Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning for Complex Word Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01108/) (2020)
- [Domain Adaptation in Multilingual and Multi-Domain Monolingual Settings for Complex Word Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07283/) (2022)
- [Fast and Vectorizable Alternative to Binary Search in O(1) Applicable to a Wide Domain of Sorted Arrays of Floating Point Numbers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.08620/) (2015)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Opportunities and Challenges of LLMs in Education: An NLP Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22753/) (2025)
- [CEFR-Annotated WordNet: LLM-Based Proficiency-Guided Semantic Database for Language Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18466/) (2025)
- [Sakura at BEA 2026 Shared Task 1: What Makes Vocabulary Difficult?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14257/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Complex Word Identification (CWI) is an essential step in the lexical simplification task and has recently become a task on its own. Some variations of this binary classification task have emerged, such as lexical complexity prediction (LCP) and complexity evaluation of multi-word expressions (MWE). Large language models (LLMs) recently became popular in the Natural Language Processing community because of their versatility and capability to solve unseen tasks in zero/few-shot settings. Our work investigates LLM usage, specifically open-source models such as Llama 2, Llama 3, and Vicuna v1.5, and closed-source, such as ChatGPT-3.5-turbo and GPT-4o, in the CWI, LCP, and MWE settings. We evaluate zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning settings and show that LLMs struggle in certain conditions or achieve comparable results against existing methods. In addition, we provide some views on meta-learning combined with prompt learning. In the end, we conclude that the current state of LLMs cannot or barely outperform existing methods, which are usually much smaller.