A Nontrivial Sentence Corpus for the Task of Sentence Readability Assessment in Portuguese

Sidney Evaldo Leal, Magali Sanches Duran, Sandra Maria Aluísio


Abstract
Effective textual communication depends on readers being proficient enough to comprehend texts, and texts being clear enough to be understood by the intended audience, in a reading task. When the meaning of textual information and instructions is not well conveyed, many losses and damages may occur. Among the solutions to alleviate this problem is the automatic evaluation of sentence readability, task which has been receiving a lot of attention due to its large applicability. However, a shortage of resources, such as corpora for training and evaluation, hinders the full development of this task. In this paper, we generate a nontrivial sentence corpus in Portuguese. We evaluate three scenarios for building it, taking advantage of a parallel corpus of simplification, in which each sentence triplet is aligned and has simplification operations annotated, being ideal for justifying possible mistakes of future methods. The best scenario of our corpus PorSimplesSent is composed of 4,888 pairs, which is bigger than a similar corpus for English; all the three versions of it are publicly available. We created four baselines for PorSimplesSent and made available a pairwise ranking method, using 17 linguistic and psycholinguistic features, which correctly identifies the ranking of sentence pairs with an accuracy of 74.2%.
Anthology ID:
C18-1034
Volume:
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Editors:
Emily M. Bender, Leon Derczynski, Pierre Isabelle
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
401–413
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1034
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sidney Evaldo Leal, Magali Sanches Duran, and Sandra Maria Aluísio. 2018. A Nontrivial Sentence Corpus for the Task of Sentence Readability Assessment in Portuguese. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 401–413, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Nontrivial Sentence Corpus for the Task of Sentence Readability Assessment in Portuguese (Leal et al., COLING 2018)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1034.pdf