Automatically evaluating the conceptual complexity of German texts

Conceptual complexity is concerned with the background knowledge needed to understand concepts within a text and their implicit connections (Hulpus, et al., 2019). In the present study, a recently proposed framework from Hulpus, et al. (2019), which assesses the conceptual complexity of English newspaper articles, is replicated and adapted to German lexica entries aimed at three different age groups. The final results on the corpus of 885 German texts improve upon the original study in both a pairwise classification task and a ranking task, showing that the framework transfers well to a different language and a different genre. We release the dataset used, as well as an extended version with a total of ca. 3000 texts.