CEFR-Based Sentence Difficulty Annotation and Assessment
Yuki Arase, Satoru Uchida, Tomoyuki Kajiwara
Abstract
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.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{arase-etal-2022-cefr,
title = "{CEFR}-Based Sentence Difficulty Annotation and Assessment",
author = "Arase, Yuki and
Uchida, Satoru and
Kajiwara, Tomoyuki",
editor = "Goldberg, Yoav and
Kozareva, Zornitsa and
Zhang, Yue",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = dec,
year = "2022",
address = "Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.416/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.416",
pages = "6206--6219"
}