@inproceedings{weiss-meurers-2022-assessing,
    title = "Assessing sentence readability for {G}erman language learners with broad linguistic modeling or readability formulas: When do linguistic insights make a difference?",
    author = "Weiss, Zarah  and
      Meurers, Detmar",
    editor = {Kochmar, Ekaterina  and
      Burstein, Jill  and
      Horbach, Andrea  and
      Laarmann-Quante, Ronja  and
      Madnani, Nitin  and
      Tack, Ana{\"i}s  and
      Yaneva, Victoria  and
      Yuan, Zheng  and
      Zesch, Torsten},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 17th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2022)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Seattle, Washington",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2022.bea-1.19/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.bea-1.19",
    pages = "141--153",
    abstract = "We present a new state-of-the-art sentence-wise readability assessment model for German L2 readers. We build a linguistically broadly informed machine learning model and compare its performance against four commonly used readability formulas. To understand when the linguistic insights used to inform our model make a difference for readability assessment and when simple readability formulas suffice, we compare their performance based on two common automatic readability assessment tasks: predictive regression and sentence pair ranking. We find that leveraging linguistic insights yields top performances across tasks, but that for the identification of simplified sentences also readability formulas {--} which are easier to compute and more accessible {--} can be sufficiently precise. Linguistically informed modeling, however, is the only viable option for high quality outcomes in fine-grained prediction tasks. We then explore the sentence-wise readability profile of leveled texts written for language learners at a beginning, intermediate, and advanced level of German to showcase the valuable insights that sentence-wise readability assessment can have for the adaptation of learning materials and better understand how sentences' individual readability contributes to larger texts' overall readability."
}