Estimating Lexical Complexity from Document-Level Distributions

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Wold, Sondre, Mæhlum, Petter, Hove, Oddbjørn
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Wold, Sondre
Mæhlum, Petter
Hove, Oddbjørn
author_facet Wold, Sondre
Mæhlum, Petter
Hove, Oddbjørn
contents Existing methods for complexity estimation are typically developed for entire documents. This limitation in scope makes them inapplicable for shorter pieces of text, such as health assessment tools. These typically consist of lists of independent sentences, all of which are too short for existing methods to apply. The choice of wording in these assessment tools is crucial, as both the cognitive capacity and the linguistic competency of the intended patient groups could vary substantially. As a first step towards creating better tools for supporting health practitioners, we develop a two-step approach for estimating lexical complexity that does not rely on any pre-annotated data. We implement our approach for the Norwegian language and verify its effectiveness using statistical testing and a qualitative evaluation of samples from real assessment tools. We also investigate the relationship between our complexity measure and certain features typically associated with complexity in the literature, such as word length, frequency, and the number of syllables.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_01196
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Estimating Lexical Complexity from Document-Level Distributions
Wold, Sondre
Mæhlum, Petter
Hove, Oddbjørn
Computation and Language
Existing methods for complexity estimation are typically developed for entire documents. This limitation in scope makes them inapplicable for shorter pieces of text, such as health assessment tools. These typically consist of lists of independent sentences, all of which are too short for existing methods to apply. The choice of wording in these assessment tools is crucial, as both the cognitive capacity and the linguistic competency of the intended patient groups could vary substantially. As a first step towards creating better tools for supporting health practitioners, we develop a two-step approach for estimating lexical complexity that does not rely on any pre-annotated data. We implement our approach for the Norwegian language and verify its effectiveness using statistical testing and a qualitative evaluation of samples from real assessment tools. We also investigate the relationship between our complexity measure and certain features typically associated with complexity in the literature, such as word length, frequency, and the number of syllables.
title Estimating Lexical Complexity from Document-Level Distributions
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.01196