Age Recommendation for Texts

Alexis Blandin, Gwénolé Lecorvé, Delphine Battistelli, Aline Étienne

Abstract
The understanding of a text by a reader or listener is conditioned by the adequacy of the text’s characteristics with the person’s capacities and knowledge. This adequacy is critical in the case of a child since her/his cognitive and linguistic skills are still under development. Hence, in this paper, we present and study an original natural language processing (NLP) task which consists in predicting the age from which a text can be understood by someone. To do so, this paper first exhibits features derived from the psycholinguistic domain, as well as some coming from related NLP tasks. Then, we propose a set of neural network models and compare them on a dataset of French texts dedicated to young or adult audiences. To circumvent the lack of data, we study the idea to predict ages at the sentence level. The experiments first show that the sentence-based age recommendations can be efficiently merged to predict text-based recommendations. Then, we also demonstrate that the age predictions returned by our best model are better than those provided by psycholinguists. Finally, the paper investigates the impact of the various features used in these results.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.179
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
1431–1439
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.179
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alexis Blandin, Gwénolé Lecorvé, Delphine Battistelli, and Aline Étienne. 2020. Age Recommendation for Texts. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 1431–1439, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Age Recommendation for Texts (Blandin et al., LREC 2020)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2020.lrec-1.179.pdf
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