@inproceedings{loefflad-etal-2026-criterial,
    title = "Criterial Features in {G}erman: Towards Interpretable {NLP} in Readability Assessment",
    author = "Loefflad, Denise  and
      Kathmann, Sofia  and
      Holz, Heiko  and
      Meurers, Detmar",
    editor = "Kochmar, Ekaterina  and
      Alhafni, Bashar  and
      Bann{\`o}, Stefano  and
      Bexte, Marie  and
      Burstein, Jill  and
      Horbach, Andrea  and
      Laarmann-Quante, Ronja  and
      Tack, Anais  and
      Yaneva, Victoria  and
      Yuan, Zheng",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 21st Workshop on Innovative Use of {NLP} for Building Educational Applications ({BEA} 2026)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.bea-1.6/",
    pages = "63--77",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-409-5",
    abstract = "This paper presents an empirical evaluation of the German Grammar Profile (GGP), a CEFR-aligned resource of criterial features, and its corresponding extraction system PALME. We design a systematic test suite in which each feature extractor is evaluated on controlled positive and negative examples. The results show that PALME achieves high precision and recall across all CEFR levels, with over 90{\%} of features achieving scores above 0.8. Qualitative analysis shows that lower performance primarily results from morphological ambiguity in noun and adjective case marking. To evaluate the usefulness of the criterial features of the GGP for CEFR-aligned readability assessment, we assess their predictive power using Explainable Boosting Machines on graded readers. The model achieves strong performance (precision: 0.75, recall: 0.73). Our qualitative analysis shows that features related to specific verb constructions follow patterns consistent with developmental stages predicted by Processability Theory. These findings underline the value and relevance of criterial features for modeling language development in readability assessment."
}