CLaC @ QATS: Quality Assessment for Text Simplification

This paper describes our approach to the 2016 QATS quality assessment shared task. We trained three independent Random Forest classifiers in order to assess the quality of the simplified texts in terms of grammaticality, meaning preservation and simplicity. We used the language model of Google-Ngram as feature to predict the grammaticality. Meaning preservation is predicted using two complementary approaches based on word embedding and WordNet synonyms. A wider range of features including TF-IDF, sentence length and frequency of cue phrases are used to evaluate the simplicity aspect. Overall, the accuracy of the system ranges from 33.33% for the overall aspect to 58.73% for grammaticality.