Speaker: David Alfter, Institut Langage et communication, CENTAL
Title: FABRA: An aggregator-based readability assessment toolkit and its applications to not only readability research
Abstract: In this talk I will present the FABRA toolkit developed in the context of a research collaboration between France Education International and Cental. The aim of the project is to automatically grade learner essays. As a first step towards this goal, we developed FABRA, the French Aggregator-Based Readability Assessment toolkit, a feature extractor whose novelty lies in its use of aggregators on top of feature values (for example minimum, median, curtosis). I will also present research opportunities for FABRA besides its eponymous readability association, such as stylistic analysis, and its use in the recent Verb Profile project that aims at characterizing verb uses in textbooks and learner productions.