On the Influence of Contextual Features for the Identification of Complex Words

Abstract

This paper evaluates the effect of the context of a target word on the identification of complex words in natural language texts. The approach automatically tags words as either complex or not, based on two sets of features: base features that only pertain to the target word, and contextual features that take the context of the target word into account. We experimented with several supervised machine learning models, and trained and tested the approach with the 2016 SemEval Word Complexity Data Set. Results show that when discriminating base features are used, the words around the target word can supplement those features and improve the recognition of complex words.