@inproceedings{deutsch-etal-2020-linguistic,
    title = "Linguistic Features for Readability Assessment",
    author = "Deutsch, Tovly  and
      Jasbi, Masoud  and
      Shieber, Stuart",
    editor = "Burstein, Jill  and
      Kochmar, Ekaterina  and
      Leacock, Claudia  and
      Madnani, Nitin  and
      Pil{\'a}n, Ildik{\'o}  and
      Yannakoudakis, Helen  and
      Zesch, Torsten",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fifteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications",
    month = jul,
    year = "2020",
    address = "Seattle, WA, USA → Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2020.bea-1.1",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2020.bea-1.1",
    pages = "1--17",
    abstract = "Readability assessment aims to automatically classify text by the level appropriate for learning readers. Traditional approaches to this task utilize a variety of linguistically motivated features paired with simple machine learning models. More recent methods have improved performance by discarding these features and utilizing deep learning models. However, it is unknown whether augmenting deep learning models with linguistically motivated features would improve performance further. This paper combines these two approaches with the goal of improving overall model performance and addressing this question. Evaluating on two large readability corpora, we find that, given sufficient training data, augmenting deep learning models with linguistically motivated features does not improve state-of-the-art performance. Our results provide preliminary evidence for the hypothesis that the state-of-the-art deep learning models represent linguistic features of the text related to readability. Future research on the nature of representations formed in these models can shed light on the learned features and their relations to linguistically motivated ones hypothesized in traditional approaches.",
}