COLING 2020main8 citations

Mama/Papa, Is this Text for Me?

Rashedur Rahman, Gwénolé Lecorvé, Aline Étienne, Delphine Battistelli, Nicolas Béchet, Jonathan Chevelu

Abstract

Children have less linguistic skills than adults, which makes it more difficult for them to understand some texts, for instance when browsing the Internet. In this context, we present a novel method which predicts the minimal age from which a text can be understood. This method analyses each sentence of a text using a recurrent neural network, and then aggregates this information to provide the text-level prediction. Different approaches are proposed and compared to baseline models, at sentence and text levels. Experiments are carried out on a corpus of 1, 500 texts and 160K sentences. Our best model, based on LSTMs, outperforms state-of-the-art results and achieves mean absolute errors of 1.86 and 2.28, at sentence and text levels, respectively.

BibTeX
@inproceedings{rahman-etal-2020-mama,
    title = "Mama/Papa, Is this Text for Me?",
    author = "Rahman, Rashedur  and
      Lecorv{\'e}, Gw{\'e}nol{\'e}  and
      {\'E}tienne, Aline  and
      Battistelli, Delphine  and
      B{\'e}chet, Nicolas  and
      Chevelu, Jonathan",
    editor = "Scott, Donia  and
      Bel, Nuria  and
      Zong, Chengqing",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
    month = dec,
    year = "2020",
    address = "Barcelona, Spain (Online)",
    publisher = "International Committee on Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.554/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.554",
    pages = "6296--6301"
}
Mama/Papa, Is this Text for Me? · COLING 2020