@inproceedings{imperial-2021-bert,
    title = "{BERT} Embeddings for Automatic Readability Assessment",
    author = "Imperial, Joseph Marvin",
    editor = "Mitkov, Ruslan  and
      Angelova, Galia",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2021)",
    month = sep,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Held Online",
    publisher = "INCOMA Ltd.",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2021.ranlp-1.69/",
    pages = "611--618",
    abstract = "Automatic readability assessment (ARA) is the task of evaluating the level of ease or difficulty of text documents for a target audience. For researchers, one of the many open problems in the field is to make such models trained for the task show efficacy even for low-resource languages. In this study, we propose an alternative way of utilizing the information-rich embeddings of BERT models with handcrafted linguistic features through a combined method for readability assessment. Results show that the proposed method outperforms classical approaches in readability assessment using English and Filipino datasets, obtaining as high as 12.4{\%} increase in F1 performance. We also show that the general information encoded in BERT embeddings can be used as a substitute feature set for low-resource languages like Filipino with limited semantic and syntactic NLP tools to explicitly extract feature values for the task."
}