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Multilingual Resources for Lexical Complexity Prediction: A Review

Lexical complexity prediction is the NLP task aimed at using machine learning to predict the difficulty of a target word in context for a given user or user group. Multiple datasets exist for lexical complexity prediction, many of which have been published recently in diverse languages. In this survey, we discuss nine recent datasets (2018-2024) all of which provide lexical complexity prediction annotations. Particularly, we identified eight languages (French, Spanish, Chinese, German, Russian, Japanese, Turkish and Portuguese) with at least one lexical complexity dataset. We do not consider the English datasets, which have already received significant treatment elsewhere in the literature. To survey these datasets, we use the recommendations of the Complex 2.0 Framework (Shardlow et al., 2022), identifying how the datasets differ along the following dimensions: annotation scale, context, multiple token instances, multiple token annotations, diverse annotators. We conclude with future research challenges arising from our survey of existing lexical complexity prediction datasets.