TUDA-CCL at SemEval-2021 Task 1: Using Gradient-boosted Regression Tree Ensembles Trained on a Heterogeneous Feature Set for Predicting Lexical Complexity

Sebastian Gombert, Sabine Bartsch


Abstract
In this paper, we present our systems submitted to SemEval-2021 Task 1 on lexical complexity prediction. The aim of this shared task was to create systems able to predict the lexical complexity of word tokens and bigram multiword expressions within a given sentence context, a continuous value indicating the difficulty in understanding a respective utterance. Our approach relies on gradient boosted regression tree ensembles fitted using a heterogeneous feature set combining linguistic features, static and contextualized word embeddings, psycholinguistic norm lexica, WordNet, word- and character bigram frequencies and inclusion in wordlists to create a model able to assign a word or multiword expression a context-dependent complexity score. We can show that especially contextualised string embeddings can help with predicting lexical complexity.
Anthology ID:
2021.semeval-1.12
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:
130–137
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.semeval-1.12
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.semeval-1.12
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sebastian Gombert and Sabine Bartsch. 2021. TUDA-CCL at SemEval-2021 Task 1: Using Gradient-boosted Regression Tree Ensembles Trained on a Heterogeneous Feature Set for Predicting Lexical Complexity. In Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2021), pages 130–137, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TUDA-CCL at SemEval-2021 Task 1: Using Gradient-boosted Regression Tree Ensembles Trained on a Heterogeneous Feature Set for Predicting Lexical Complexity (Gombert & Bartsch, SemEval 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.semeval-1.12.pdf
Optional supplementary material:
 2021.semeval-1.12.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip