Going Beyond Passages: Readability Assessment for Book-level Long Texts

Li Wenbiao, Sun Rui, Zhang Tianyi, Wu Yunfang


Abstract
“Readability assessment for book-level long text is widely needed in real educational applica-tions. However, most of the current researches focus on passage-level readability assessmentand little work has been done to process ultra-long texts. In order to process the long sequenceof book texts better and to enhance pretrained models with difficulty knowledge, we propose anovel model DSDR, difficulty-aware segment pre-training and difficulty multi-view representa-tion. Specifically, we split all books into multiple fixed-length segments and employ unsuper-vised clustering to obtain difficulty-aware segments, which are used to re-train the pretrainedmodel to learn difficulty knowledge. Accordingly, a long text is represented by averaging mul-tiple vectors of segments with varying difficulty levels. We construct a new dataset of GradedChildren’s Books to evaluate model performance. Our proposed model achieves promising re-sults, outperforming both the traditional SVM classifier and several popular pretrained models.In addition, our work establishes a new prototype for book-level readability assessment, whichprovides an important benchmark for related research in future work.”
Anthology ID:
2024.ccl-1.100
Volume:
Proceedings of the 23rd Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Main Conference)
Month:
July
Year:
2024
Address:
Taiyuan, China
Editors:
Maosong Sun, Jiye Liang, Xianpei Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Yulan He
Venue:
CCL
SIG:
Publisher:
Chinese Information Processing Society of China
Note:
Pages:
1298–1309
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.ccl-1.100/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Li Wenbiao, Sun Rui, Zhang Tianyi, and Wu Yunfang. 2024. Going Beyond Passages: Readability Assessment for Book-level Long Texts. In Proceedings of the 23rd Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Main Conference), pages 1298–1309, Taiyuan, China. Chinese Information Processing Society of China.
Cite (Informal):
Going Beyond Passages: Readability Assessment for Book-level Long Texts (Wenbiao et al., CCL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.ccl-1.100.pdf