@inproceedings{khallaf-sharoff-2021-automatic,
    title = "Automatic Difficulty Classification of {A}rabic Sentences",
    author = "Khallaf, Nouran  and
      Sharoff, Serge",
    editor = "Habash, Nizar  and
      Bouamor, Houda  and
      Hajj, Hazem  and
      Magdy, Walid  and
      Zaghouani, Wajdi  and
      Bougares, Fethi  and
      Tomeh, Nadi  and
      Abu Farha, Ibrahim  and
      Touileb, Samia",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Sixth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop",
    month = apr,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Kyiv, Ukraine (Virtual)",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2021.wanlp-1.11/",
    pages = "105--114",
    abstract = "In this paper, we present a Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) Sentence difficulty classifier, which predicts the difficulty of sentences for language learners using either the CEFR proficiency levels or the binary classification as simple or complex. We compare the use of sentence embeddings of different kinds (fastText, mBERT , XLM-R and Arabic-BERT), as well as traditional language features such as POS tags, dependency trees, readability scores and frequency lists for language learners. Our best results have been achieved using fined-tuned Arabic-BERT. The accuracy of our 3-way CEFR classification is F-1 of 0.80 and 0.75 for Arabic-Bert and XLM-R classification respectively and 0.71 Spearman correlation for regression. Our binary difficulty classifier reaches F-1 0.94 and F-1 0.98 for sentence-pair semantic similarity classifier."
}