README.md

GermEval 2022

Repository containing the experiments described in our paper for the GermEval 2022 challenge: "Automatic Readability Assessment of German Sentences with Transformer Ensembles" (available online).

Dataset

We translated the given German dataset to English during preprocessing. The resulting training, validation and test split is available in the folder data.

Additionally we created some handcrafted readability features for German as well as English. The scripts used to generate these can be found in data_processing. Their corresponding splits can be found in data/features.

Experiments

To evaluate the ability of a model (ensemble) to predict the complexity of a sentence, we conducted experiments with the following parameters:

• BOOTSTRAP_SIZE: number of random samples with replacement from a given population of models
• MAX_ENSEMBLE_SIZE: max amount of members within one ensemble, used to iterate to
• ENSEMBLE_POOL_SIZE: model population size

The following experiments are available in experiments:

• ensemble_size_gbert.py: evaluating GBERT ensembles
• ensemble_size_wechsel.py: evaluating GPT-2-Wechsel ensembles
• ensemble_size_wechsel_gbert.py: evalualting mixed ensembles

The submitted best ensemble generation can be found in submissions/sub_ensemble_wechsel_gbert.py

Installation

A current Anaconda/Miniconda environment is required.

To install the given conda environment use the following command:

conda env create -f environment.yml

Academic citation

Please use the following citation when referencing this software:

Patrick Gustav Blaneck, Tobias Bornheim, Niklas Grieger, and Stephan Bialonski. 2022. Automatic Readability Assessment of German Sentences with Transformer Ensembles. In Proceedings of the GermEval 2022 Workshop on Text Complexity Assessment of German Text, pages 57–62, Potsdam, Germany. Association for Computational Linguistics.

@inproceedings{blaneck2022,
    title = "Automatic Readability Assessment of {G}erman Sentences with Transformer Ensembles",
    author = "Blaneck, Patrick Gustav  and
      Bornheim, Tobias  and
      Grieger, Niklas  and
      Bialonski, Stephan",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the GermEval 2022 Workshop on Text Complexity Assessment of German Text",
    month = sep,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Potsdam, Germany",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.germeval-1.10",
    pages = "57--62",
}