Attention-based Model for Evaluating the Complexity of Sentences in English Language

The automation of text complexity evaluation (ATCE) is an emerging problem which has been tackled by means of different methodologies. We present an effective deep-learning-based solution which leverages both Recurrent Neural and the Attention mechanism. The developed system is capable of classifying sentences written in the English language by analysing their syntactical and lexical complexity. An accurate test phase has been carried out, and the system has been compared with a baseline tool based on the Support Vector Machine. This paper represents an extension of a previous deep learning model, which allows showing the suitability of Neural Networks to evaluate sentence complexity in two different languages: Italian and English.