Salar Mohtaj, Vera Schmitt, Razieh Khamsehashari, Sebastian Möller - In Proceedings of the 9th Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2023
Automated text readability assessment is the process of assigning a number to the level of difficulty of a piece of text automatically. Machine learning and natural language processing techniques made it possible to measure the readability and complexity of the fast-growing textual content on the web. In this paper, we proposed a multi-task learning approach to predict the readability of German text based on pre-trained models. The proposed multi-task model has been trained on three tasks: text complexity, understandability, and lexical difficulty assessment. The results show a significant improvement in the model’s performance in the multi-task learning setting compared to single-task learning, where each model has been trained separately for each task