English

One Size Does Not Fit All: The Case for Personalised Word Complexity Models

Computation and Language 2022-05-06 v1 Artificial Intelligence Human-Computer Interaction Machine Learning

Abstract

Complex Word Identification (CWI) aims to detect words within a text that a reader may find difficult to understand. It has been shown that CWI systems can improve text simplification, readability prediction and vocabulary acquisition modelling. However, the difficulty of a word is a highly idiosyncratic notion that depends on a reader's first language, proficiency and reading experience. In this paper, we show that personal models are best when predicting word complexity for individual readers. We use a novel active learning framework that allows models to be tailored to individuals and release a dataset of complexity annotations and models as a benchmark for further research.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2205.02564,
  title  = {One Size Does Not Fit All: The Case for Personalised Word Complexity Models},
  author = {Sian Gooding and Manuel Tragut},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.02564},
  year   = {2022}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T11:08:03.707Z