Lexical simplification benchmarks for English, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Even in highly-developed countries, as many as 15-30% of the population can only understand texts written using a basic vocabulary. Their understanding of everyday texts is limited, which prevents them from taking an active role in society and making informed decisions regarding healthcare, legal representation, or democratic choice. Lexical simplification is a natural language processing task that aims to make text understandable to everyone by replacing complex vocabulary and expressions with simpler ones, while preserving the original meaning.