Towards a French lexicon with difficulty measures: NLP helping to bridge the gap between traditional dictionaries and specialized lexicons.

The readability of a text depends on a number of linguistic factors, among which its lexical complexity. In this paper, we specifically explore this issue: our aim is to characterize the criteria that make a word easy to understand independently of the context in which it appears. Yet such a concern must be addressed in the context of particular groups of individuals. In our case, we have focused on language production from patients with language disorders. The results obtained from corpus analysis enable us to define a number of variables which are compared to information from existing resources. Such measures are used in a classification model to predict the degree of difficulty of words and to build a lexical resource, called ReSyf, in which the words and their synonyms are classified according to three levels of complexity