@InProceedings{wang-andersen:2016:COLING,
  author    = {Wang, Shuhan  and  Andersen, Erik},
  title     = {Grammatical Templates: Improving Text Difficulty Evaluation for Language Learners},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers},
  month     = {December},
  year      = {2016},
  address   = {Osaka, Japan},
  publisher = {The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee},
  pages     = {1692--1702},
  abstract  = {Language students are most engaged while reading texts at an appropriate
	difficulty level. However, existing methods of evaluating text difficulty focus
	mainly on vocabulary and do not prioritize grammatical features,  hence they do
	not work well for language learners with limited knowledge of grammar. In this
	paper, we introduce grammatical templates, the expert-identified units of
	grammar that students learn from class, as an important feature of text
	difficulty evaluation. Experimental classification results show that
	grammatical template features significantly improve text difficulty prediction
	accuracy over baseline readability features by 7.4%. Moreover,we build a simple
	and human-understandable text difficulty evaluation approach with 87.7%
	accuracy, using only 5 grammatical template features.},
  url       = {http://aclweb.org/anthology/C16-1159}
}