[Submitted on 9 Sep 2026]
Title:Analyzing Traditional and Neural Approaches to Multilingual Readability Assessment
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Abstract:Transformer-based models excel at Automatic Readability Assessment (ARA), yet feature-based models remain in active use because their predictions tie back to linguistic properties. This matters because readability labels are subjective and rater-dependent, so high accuracy on noisy ground truth may reflect surface patterns rather than the linguistic structure that defines difficulty. We test whether transformers internalize the same features as traditional models across Arabic, English, French, Hindi, and Russian using the ReadMe++ dataset. Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) identify the features driving traditional classifiers, which we then use as TCAV concept sets to probe multilingual XLM-R and language-specific encoders. Transformers recover surface-length, syntactic, and lexical-diversity signals, and reflect the ordinal CEFR structure of the traditional models. Alignment varies by model family, language, and layer, with language-specific encoders tracking traditional models more clearly than XLM-R. High linear separability does not always imply directional influence, limiting linear probing for count-based readability features.
Subjects:
Computation and Language (cs.CL)
Cite as: arXiv:2609.10792 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2609.10792v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.10792
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Joshua Wong [view email] [v1] Wed, 9 Sep 2026 19:56:09 UTC (4,677 KB)
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