@inproceedings{stajner-hulpus-2018-automatic,
    title = "Automatic Assessment of Conceptual Text Complexity Using Knowledge Graphs",
    author = "{\v{S}}tajner, Sanja  and
      Hulpu{\c{s}}, Ioana",
    editor = "Bender, Emily M.  and
      Derczynski, Leon  and
      Isabelle, Pierre",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
    month = aug,
    year = "2018",
    address = "Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/C18-1027/",
    pages = "318--330",
    abstract = "Complexity of texts is usually assessed only at the lexical and syntactic levels. Although it is known that conceptual complexity plays a significant role in text understanding, no attempts have been made at assessing it automatically. We propose to automatically estimate the conceptual complexity of texts by exploiting a number of graph-based measures on a large knowledge base. By using a high-quality language learners corpus for English, we show that graph-based measures of individual text concepts, as well as the way they relate to each other in the knowledge graph, have a high discriminative power when distinguishing between two versions of the same text. Furthermore, when used as features in a binary classification task aiming to choose the simpler of two versions of the same text, our measures achieve high performance even in a default setup."
}