UniHD at TSAR-2022 Shared Task: Is Compute All We Need for Lexical Simplification?

Abstract

Previous state-of-the-art models for lexical simplification consist of complex pipelines with several components, each of which requires deep technical knowledge and fine-tuned interaction to achieve its full potential. As an alternative, we describe a frustratingly simple pipeline based on prompted GPT-3 responses, beating competing approaches by a wide margin in settings with few training instances. Our best-performing submission to the English language track of the TSAR-2022 shared task consists of an ``ensemble'' of six different prompt templates with varying context levels. As a late-breaking result, we further detail a language transfer technique that allows simplification in languages other than English. Applied to the Spanish and Portuguese subset, we achieve state-of-the-art results with only minor modification to the original prompts. Aside from detailing the implementation and setup, we spend the remainder of this work discussing the particularities of prompting and implications for future work. Code for the experiments is available online at https://github.com/dennlinger/TSAR-2022-Shared-Task