Linguistic Features for Readability Assessment

Tovly Deutsch, Masoud Jasbi, Stuart Shieber


Abstract
Readability assessment aims to automatically classify text by the level appropriate for learning readers. Traditional approaches to this task utilize a variety of linguistically motivated features paired with simple machine learning models. More recent methods have improved performance by discarding these features and utilizing deep learning models. However, it is unknown whether augmenting deep learning models with linguistically motivated features would improve performance further. This paper combines these two approaches with the goal of improving overall model performance and addressing this question. Evaluating on two large readability corpora, we find that, given sufficient training data, augmenting deep learning models with linguistically motivated features does not improve state-of-the-art performance. Our results provide preliminary evidence for the hypothesis that the state-of-the-art deep learning models represent linguistic features of the text related to readability. Future research on the nature of representations formed in these models can shed light on the learned features and their relations to linguistically motivated ones hypothesized in traditional approaches.
Anthology ID:
2020.bea-1.1
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Seattle, WA, USA → Online
Venue:
BEA
SIG:
SIGEDU
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–17
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.bea-1.1
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.bea-1.1
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tovly Deutsch, Masoud Jasbi, and Stuart Shieber. 2020. Linguistic Features for Readability Assessment. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, pages 1–17, Seattle, WA, USA → Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Linguistic Features for Readability Assessment (Deutsch et al., BEA 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/2020.bea-1.1.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38929846
Code
 TovlyDeutsch/Linguistic-Features-for-Readability
Data
CELEX