BERT Embeddings for Automatic Readability Assessment

Understand

Automatic readability assessment (ARA) is the task of evaluating the level of ease or difficulty of text documents for a target audience.

• For researchers, one of the many open problems in the field is to make such models trained for the task show efficacy even for low-resource languages.
• In this study, we propose an alternative way of utilizing the information-rich embeddings of BERT models with handcrafted linguistic features through a combined method for readability assessment.
• Results show that the proposed method outperforms classical approaches in readability assessment using English and Filipino datasets, obtaining as high as 12.4% increase in F1 performance.