Automatic Assessment of Conceptual Text Complexity Using Knowledge Graphs

Sanja Štajner, Ioana Hulpuş


Abstract
Complexity of texts is usually assessed only at the lexical and syntactic levels. Although it is known that conceptual complexity plays a significant role in text understanding, no attempts have been made at assessing it automatically. We propose to automatically estimate the conceptual complexity of texts by exploiting a number of graph-based measures on a large knowledge base. By using a high-quality language learners corpus for English, we show that graph-based measures of individual text concepts, as well as the way they relate to each other in the knowledge graph, have a high discriminative power when distinguishing between two versions of the same text. Furthermore, when used as features in a binary classification task aiming to choose the simpler of two versions of the same text, our measures achieve high performance even in a default setup.
Anthology ID:
C18-1027
Volume:
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Editors:
Emily M. Bender, Leon Derczynski, Pierre Isabelle
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
318–330
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1027
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sanja Štajner and Ioana Hulpuş. 2018. Automatic Assessment of Conceptual Text Complexity Using Knowledge Graphs. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 318–330, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Automatic Assessment of Conceptual Text Complexity Using Knowledge Graphs (Štajner & Hulpuş, COLING 2018)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1027.pdf