Exploring hybrid approaches to readability: experiments on the complementarity between linguistic features and transformers

Rodrigo Wilkens, Patrick Watrin, Rémi Cardon, Alice Pintard, Isabelle Gribomont, Thomas François


Abstract
Linguistic features have a strong contribution in the context of the automatic assessment of text readability (ARA). They have been one of the anchors between the computational and theoretical models. With the development in the ARA field, the research moved to Deep Learning (DL). In an attempt to reconcile the mixed results reported in this context, we present a systematic comparison of 6 hybrid approaches along with standard Machine Learning and DL approaches, on 4 corpora (different languages and target audiences). The various experiments clearly highlighted two rather simple hybridization methods (soft label and simple concatenation). They also appear to be the most robust on smaller datasets and across various tasks and languages. This study stands out as the first to systematically compare different architectures and approaches to feature hybridization in DL, as well as comparing performance in terms of two languages and two target audiences of the text, which leads to a clearer pattern of results.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-eacl.153
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024
Month:
March
Year:
2024
Address:
St. Julian’s, Malta
Editors:
Yvette Graham, Matthew Purver
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2316–2331
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-eacl.153
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rodrigo Wilkens, Patrick Watrin, Rémi Cardon, Alice Pintard, Isabelle Gribomont, and Thomas François. 2024. Exploring hybrid approaches to readability: experiments on the complementarity between linguistic features and transformers. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024, pages 2316–2331, St. Julian’s, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Exploring hybrid approaches to readability: experiments on the complementarity between linguistic features and transformers (Wilkens et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-eacl.153.pdf
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 https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-eacl.153.mp4