UPB at SemEval-2021 Task 1: Combining Deep Learning and Hand-Crafted Features for Lexical Complexity Prediction

George-Eduard Zaharia, Dumitru-Clementin Cercel, Mihai Dascalu


Abstract
Reading is a complex process which requires proper understanding of texts in order to create coherent mental representations. However, comprehension problems may arise due to hard-to-understand sections, which can prove troublesome for readers, while accounting for their specific language skills. As such, steps towards simplifying these sections can be performed, by accurately identifying and evaluating difficult structures. In this paper, we describe our approach for the SemEval-2021 Task 1: Lexical Complexity Prediction competition that consists of a mixture of advanced NLP techniques, namely Transformer-based language models, pre-trained word embeddings, Graph Convolutional Networks, Capsule Networks, as well as a series of hand-crafted textual complexity features. Our models are applicable on both subtasks and achieve good performance results, with a MAE below 0.07 and a Person correlation of .73 for single word identification, as well as a MAE below 0.08 and a Person correlation of .79 for multiple word targets. Our results are just 5.46% and 6.5% lower than the top scores obtained in the competition on the first and the second subtasks, respectively.
Anthology ID:
2021.semeval-1.77
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2021)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Alexis Palmer, Nathan Schneider, Natalie Schluter, Guy Emerson, Aurelie Herbelot, Xiaodan Zhu
Venue:
SemEval
SIG:
SIGLEX
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
609–616
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.semeval-1.77
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.semeval-1.77
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
George-Eduard Zaharia, Dumitru-Clementin Cercel, and Mihai Dascalu. 2021. UPB at SemEval-2021 Task 1: Combining Deep Learning and Hand-Crafted Features for Lexical Complexity Prediction. In Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2021), pages 609–616, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
UPB at SemEval-2021 Task 1: Combining Deep Learning and Hand-Crafted Features for Lexical Complexity Prediction (Zaharia et al., SemEval 2021)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2021.semeval-1.77.pdf