Automatic Readability Assessment of German Sentences with Transformer Ensembles

Patrick Gustav Blaneck, Tobias Bornheim, Niklas Grieger, Stephan Bialonski


Abstract
Reliable methods for automatic readability assessment have the potential to impact a variety of fields, ranging from machine translation to self-informed learning. Recently, large language models for the German language (such as GBERT and GPT-2-Wechsel) have become available, allowing to develop Deep Learning based approaches that promise to further improve automatic readability assessment. In this contribution, we studied the ability of ensembles of fine-tuned GBERT and GPT-2-Wechsel models to reliably predict the readability of German sentences. We combined these models with linguistic features and investigated the dependence of prediction performance on ensemble size and composition. Mixed ensembles of GBERT and GPT-2-Wechsel performed better than ensembles of the same size consisting of only GBERT or GPT-2-Wechsel models. Our models were evaluated in the GermEval 2022 Shared Task on Text Complexity Assessment on data of German sentences. On out-of-sample data, our best ensemble achieved a root mean squared error of 0:435.
Anthology ID:
2022.germeval-1.10
Volume:
Proceedings of the GermEval 2022 Workshop on Text Complexity Assessment of German Text
Month:
September
Year:
2022
Address:
Potsdam, Germany
Editors:
Sebastian Möller, Salar Mohtaj, Babak Naderi
Venue:
GermEval
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
57–62
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.germeval-1.10
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Patrick Gustav Blaneck, Tobias Bornheim, Niklas Grieger, and Stephan Bialonski. 2022. Automatic Readability Assessment of German Sentences with Transformer Ensembles. In Proceedings of the GermEval 2022 Workshop on Text Complexity Assessment of German Text, pages 57–62, Potsdam, Germany. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Automatic Readability Assessment of German Sentences with Transformer Ensembles (Blaneck et al., GermEval 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.germeval-1.10.pdf
Code
 dslaborg/tcc2022
Data
TextComplexityDE