English

On the Contribution of Discourse Structure on Text Complexity Assessment

Computation and Language 2017-08-22 v1

Abstract

This paper investigates the influence of discourse features on text complexity assessment. To do so, we created two data sets based on the Penn Discourse Treebank and the Simple English Wikipedia corpora and compared the influence of coherence, cohesion, surface, lexical and syntactic features to assess text complexity. Results show that with both data sets coherence features are more correlated to text complexity than the other types of features. In addition, feature selection revealed that with both data sets the top most discriminating feature is a coherence feature.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1708.05800,
  title  = {On the Contribution of Discourse Structure on Text Complexity Assessment},
  author = {Elnaz Davoodi and Leila Kosseim},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.05800},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

In Proceedings of the 17th Annual SigDial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue (SigDial 2016). pp 166-174. September 13-15. Los Angeles, USA

R2 v1 2026-06-22T21:18:26.596Z