@inproceedings{lee-etal-2020-using,
    title = "Using Verb Frames for Text Difficulty Assessment",
    author = "Lee, John  and
      Liu, Meichun  and
      Cai, Tianyuan",
    editor = "Torrent, Tiago T.  and
      Baker, Collin F.  and
      Czulo, Oliver  and
      Ohara, Kyoko  and
      Petruck, Miriam R. L.",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the International FrameNet Workshop 2020: Towards a Global, Multilingual FrameNet",
    month = may,
    year = "2020",
    address = "Marseille, France",
    publisher = "European Language Resources Association",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2020.framenet-1.8/",
    pages = "56--62",
    language = "eng",
    ISBN = "979-10-95546-58-0",
    abstract = "This paper presents the first investigation on using semantic frames to assess text difficulty. Based on Mandarin VerbNet, a verbal semantic database that adopts a frame-based approach, we examine usage patterns of ten verbs in a corpus of graded Chinese texts. We identify a number of characteristics in texts at advanced grades: more frequent use of non-core frame elements; more frequent omission of some core frame elements; increased preference for noun phrases rather than clauses as verb arguments; and more frequent metaphoric usage. These characteristics can potentially be useful for automatic prediction of text readability."
}