Learning to Classify Text Complexity for the Italian Language Using Support Vector Machines

Natural language processing is undoubtedly one of the most active fields of research in the machine learning community. In this work we propose a supervised classification system that, given in input a text written in the Italian language, predicts its linguistic complexity in terms of a level of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (better known as CEFR). The system was built by considering: (i) a dataset of texts labeled by linguistic experts was collected, (ii) some vectorisation procedures which transform any text to a numerical representation, and (iii) the training of a support vector machine’s model. Experiments were conducted following a statistically sound design and the experimental results show that the system is able to reach a good prediction accuracy.