CEFR-Based Sentence Difficulty Annotation and Assessment

Controllable text simplification is a crucial assistive technique for language learning and teaching. One of the primary factors hindering its advancement is the lack of a corpus annotated with sentence difficulty levels based on language ability descriptions. To address this problem, we created the...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2022-10
Main Authors: Arase, Yuki, Uchida, Satoru, Kajiwara, Tomoyuki
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Annotations
Controllability
English language
Sentences
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Controllable text simplification is a crucial assistive technique for language learning and teaching. One of the primary factors hindering its advancement is the lack of a corpus annotated with sentence difficulty levels based on language ability descriptions. To address this problem, we created the CEFR-based Sentence Profile (CEFR-SP) corpus, containing 17k English sentences annotated with the levels based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages assigned by English-education professionals. In addition, we propose a sentence-level assessment model to handle unbalanced level distribution because the most basic and highly proficient sentences are naturally scarce. In the experiments in this study, our method achieved a macro-F1 score of 84.5% in the level assessment, thus outperforming strong baselines employed in readability assessment.
ISSN:2331-8422