UnibucKernel: A kernel-based learning method for complex word identification

Andrei Butnaru, Radu Tudor Ionescu


Abstract
In this paper, we present a kernel-based learning approach for the 2018 Complex Word Identification (CWI) Shared Task. Our approach is based on combining multiple low-level features, such as character n-grams, with high-level semantic features that are either automatically learned using word embeddings or extracted from a lexical knowledge base, namely WordNet. After feature extraction, we employ a kernel method for the learning phase. The feature matrix is first transformed into a normalized kernel matrix. For the binary classification task (simple versus complex), we employ Support Vector Machines. For the regression task, in which we have to predict the complexity level of a word (a word is more complex if it is labeled as complex by more annotators), we employ v-Support Vector Regression. We applied our approach only on the three English data sets containing documents from Wikipedia, WikiNews and News domains. Our best result during the competition was the third place on the English Wikipedia data set. However, in this paper, we also report better post-competition results.
Anthology ID:
W18-0519
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana
Editors:
Joel Tetreault, Jill Burstein, Ekaterina Kochmar, Claudia Leacock, Helen Yannakoudakis
Venue:
BEA
SIG:
SIGEDU
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
175–183
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-0519
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-0519
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Andrei Butnaru and Radu Tudor Ionescu. 2018. UnibucKernel: A kernel-based learning method for complex word identification. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, pages 175–183, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
UnibucKernel: A kernel-based learning method for complex word identification (Butnaru & Ionescu, BEA 2018)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-0519.pdf