Self-Supervised Collaborative Information Bottleneck for Text Readability Assessment

Text readability assessment involves categorizing texts based on readers' comprehension levels. Hybrid automatic readability assessment (ARA) models, combining deep and linguistic features, have recently attracted rising attention due to their impressive performance. However, existing hybrid ARA models generally ignore the specific-intrinsic information of deep and linguistic representations, and cannot fully explore their common-intrinsic information. In this paper, we introduce a self-supervised collaborative information bottleneck (SCIB) module for ARA to address these issues. Specifically, we collaboratively consider both specific-intrinsic and common-intrinsic information of the linguistic representation and various levels of deep representations including the document-, sentence- and word-level deep representations, and yield their refined representations via a self-supervised information bottleneck scheme. Extensive experiments are conducted on four English and two Chinese corpora to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in terms of four important evaluation metrics, and the suggested SCIB module can effectively capture the specific- and common-intrinsic information.