Chinese Automatic Readability Assessment Using Adaptive Pre-training and Linguistic Feature Fusion

Abstract

Chinese Automatic Readability Assessment (ARA) aims to classify the reading difficulty of Chinese texts. To address the issues of insufficient high-quality training data and underutilization of linguistic features in existing methods, we propose a method that combines adaptive pre-training with feature fusion based on an interactive attention mechanism. First, we enhance the model’s ability to capture different text difficulties through domain- and task-specific adaptive pre-training. Then, we propose an Adaptive Task-guided Corpus Filtering (ATCF) method, utilizing embeddings generated by the pre-trained model and applying nearest-neighbor search along with a sample balancing mechanism to ensure comprehensive learning across various difficulty levels. Finally, we propose an Interactive Attention-Driven Feature Fusion method that integrates linguistic and deep features, providing rich difficulty information to the model. Experiments on Chinese textbook dataset demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Transfer learning experiments further indicate that our approach generalizes well to extracurricular reading and Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) ARA tasks.