Is Neural Language Model Perplexity Related to Readability?
Alessio Miaschi, Chiara Alzetta, Dominique Brunato⋄, Felice Dell’Orletta⋄, Giulia Venturi⋄ · Accademia University Press eBooks · 2020
This paper explores the relationship between Neural Language Model (NLM) perplexity and sentence readability. Starting from the evidence that NLMs implicitly acquire sophisticated linguistic knowledge from a huge amount of training data, our goal is to investigate whether perplexity is affected by linguistic features used to automatically assess sentence readability and if there is a correlation between the two metrics. Our findings suggest that this correlation is actually quite weak and the two metrics are affected by different linguistic phenomena.1