| --- |
| pretty_name: CWI 2018 — Complex Word Identification Shared Task |
| license: other |
| license_name: cwi-2018-shared-task |
| license_link: https://sites.google.com/view/cwisharedtask2018/ |
| task_categories: |
| - token-classification |
| - text-classification |
| language: |
| - en |
| - de |
| - es |
| - fr |
| tags: |
| - complex-word-identification |
| - cwi |
| - lexical-simplification |
| - readability |
| - bea-2018 |
| - shared-task |
| size_categories: |
| - 10K<n<100K |
| configs: |
| - config_name: english-news |
| data_files: |
| - split: train |
| path: data/english-news/train.parquet |
| - split: validation |
| path: data/english-news/validation.parquet |
| - split: test |
| path: data/english-news/test.parquet |
| - config_name: english-wikinews |
| data_files: |
| - split: train |
| path: data/english-wikinews/train.parquet |
| - split: validation |
| path: data/english-wikinews/validation.parquet |
| - split: test |
| path: data/english-wikinews/test.parquet |
| - config_name: english-wikipedia |
| data_files: |
| - split: train |
| path: data/english-wikipedia/train.parquet |
| - split: validation |
| path: data/english-wikipedia/validation.parquet |
| - split: test |
| path: data/english-wikipedia/test.parquet |
| - config_name: german |
| data_files: |
| - split: train |
| path: data/german/train.parquet |
| - split: validation |
| path: data/german/validation.parquet |
| - split: test |
| path: data/german/test.parquet |
| - config_name: spanish |
| data_files: |
| - split: train |
| path: data/spanish/train.parquet |
| - split: validation |
| path: data/spanish/validation.parquet |
| - split: test |
| path: data/spanish/test.parquet |
| - config_name: french |
| data_files: |
| - split: test |
| path: data/french/test.parquet |
| --- |
| |
| # CWI 2018 — Complex Word Identification Shared Task |
|
|
| Repackaged release of the **Complex Word Identification (CWI) Shared Task 2018** corpus (BEA-13 @ NAACL 2018), converted from the original TSV distribution into parquet with a unified schema across all four languages. |
|
|
| The shared task asks systems to predict whether a target word/phrase in context would be hard to understand for non-native speakers, children, or readers with language disabilities. It supports both a **binary** classification task (complex vs. simple) and a **probabilistic** task (proportion of annotators marking the target as difficult). |
|
|
| ## Configs |
|
|
| | Config | Language | Source | Train | Validation | Test | |
| | ------------------- | -------- | ----------------------- | ------ | ---------- | ----- | |
| | `english-news` | en | Professionally edited news | 14,002 | 1,764 | 2,095 | |
| | `english-wikinews` | en | WikiNews articles | 7,746 | 870 | 1,287 | |
| | `english-wikipedia` | en | English Wikipedia | 5,551 | 694 | 870 | |
| | `german` | de | German Wikipedia | 6,151 | 795 | 959 | |
| | `spanish` | es | Spanish Wikipedia | 13,750 | 1,622 | 2,233 | |
| | `french` | fr | French Wikipedia | — | — | 2,251 | |
|
|
| French is the cross-lingual zero-shot track: test only, no training data. |
|
|
| ## Usage |
|
|
| ```python |
| from datasets import load_dataset |
| |
| ds = load_dataset("alvations/complex-word-id-2018", "english-news") |
| print(ds["train"][0]) |
| # {'hit_id': '3P7RGTLO6EE07HLUVDKKHS6O7CCKA5', |
| # 'sentence': 'The barren islands, reefs and coral outcrops ...', |
| # 'start_offset': 4, 'end_offset': 10, 'target': 'barren', |
| # 'native_annotators': 10, 'non_native_annotators': 10, |
| # 'native_complex': 6, 'non_native_complex': 2, |
| # 'label_binary': 1, 'label_prob': 0.4, 'language': 'en'} |
| |
| # Cross-lingual eval on French |
| fr = load_dataset("alvations/complex-word-id-2018", "french", split="test") |
| ``` |
|
|
| ## Schema |
|
|
| All configs share one schema. Test splits have null label fields (gold labels were never released publicly with the test inputs — only the shared-task organisers held them). |
|
|
| | Column | Type | Description | |
| | ------------------------ | ------- | ----------- | |
| | `hit_id` | string | MTurk HIT identifier — sentences sharing a HIT were annotated together in one screen. | |
| | `sentence` | string | The full sentence containing the target. | |
| | `start_offset` | int32 | Character offset where the target begins in `sentence`. | |
| | `end_offset` | int32 | Character offset where the target ends (exclusive). | |
| | `target` | string | The candidate complex word or multiword expression. | |
| | `native_annotators` | int32 | Number of native-speaker annotators who saw the sentence. | |
| | `non_native_annotators` | int32 | Number of non-native annotators who saw the sentence. | |
| | `native_complex` | int32? | Native annotators who marked the target as difficult. (null in test) | |
| | `non_native_complex` | int32? | Non-native annotators who marked the target as difficult. (null in test) | |
| | `label_binary` | int32? | 0 = simple (no annotator marked it complex); 1 = complex (≥1 annotator marked it). (null in test) | |
| | `label_prob` | float32?| Probability label = `(native_complex + non_native_complex) / (native_annotators + non_native_annotators)`. (null in test) | |
| | `language` | string | ISO 639-1 language code (`en`, `de`, `es`, `fr`). | |
|
|
| ### Annotation protocol |
|
|
| - **English**: each sentence annotated by 10 native + 10 non-native speakers. |
| - **German / Spanish / French**: each sentence annotated by 10 annotators (mixed native + non-native). The `native_annotators` and `non_native_annotators` columns reflect the actual split per sentence (and do not always sum to 10 across all rows due to the shared-task's annotator-pooling). |
|
|
| Annotators saw paragraph context around each sentence and were asked to mark words likely to be hard for children, non-native speakers, or readers with language disabilities. |
|
|
| ## Tasks |
|
|
| - **Binary CWI**: predict `label_binary`. Standard metric: macro-F1. |
| - **Probabilistic CWI**: predict `label_prob` ∈ [0, 1]. Standard metric: MAE. |
| - **Cross-lingual transfer**: train on `english-*` / `german` / `spanish`, evaluate on `french` (no French training data exists). |
|
|
| ## Sources |
|
|
| - **English (news / wikinews / wikipedia)**: a mix of professionally-edited news articles, WikiNews articles, and English Wikipedia. |
| - **German**: German Wikipedia. |
| - **Spanish**: Spanish Wikipedia. |
| - **French**: French Wikipedia (test-only, for cross-lingual evaluation). |
|
|
| ## Citation |
|
|
| Primary citation — the shared task report ([W18-0507](https://aclanthology.org/W18-0507/)): |
|
|
| ```bibtex |
| @inproceedings{yimam-etal-2018-report, |
| title = "A Report on the Complex Word Identification Shared Task 2018", |
| author = "Yimam, Seid Muhie and |
| Biemann, Chris and |
| Malmasi, Shervin and |
| Paetzold, Gustavo and |
| Specia, Lucia and |
| {\v{S}}tajner, Sanja and |
| Tack, Ana{\"\i}s and |
| Zampieri, Marcos", |
| booktitle = "Proceedings of the Thirteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications", |
| month = jun, |
| year = "2018", |
| address = "New Orleans, Louisiana", |
| publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", |
| url = "https://aclanthology.org/W18-0507/", |
| doi = "10.18653/v1/W18-0507", |
| pages = "66--78", |
| } |
| ``` |
|
|
| Underlying corpora — please also cite the dataset papers the shared task drew on: |
|
|
| **English (News / WikiNews / Wikipedia)** — [I17-2068](https://aclanthology.org/I17-2068/): |
|
|
| ```bibtex |
| @inproceedings{yimam-etal-2017-cwig3g2, |
| title = "{CWIG}3{G}2 - Complex Word Identification Task across Three Text Genres and Two User Groups", |
| author = "Yimam, Seid Muhie and |
| {\v{S}}tajner, Sanja and |
| Riedl, Martin and |
| Biemann, Chris", |
| booktitle = "Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)", |
| month = nov, |
| year = "2017", |
| address = "Taipei, Taiwan", |
| publisher = "Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing", |
| url = "https://aclanthology.org/I17-2068/", |
| pages = "401--407", |
| } |
| ``` |
|
|
| **German / Spanish / French (multilingual)** — RANLP 2017, [R17-1104](https://aclanthology.org/R17-1104/): |
|
|
| ```bibtex |
| @inproceedings{yimam-etal-2017-multilingual, |
| title = "Multilingual and Cross-Lingual Complex Word Identification", |
| author = "Yimam, Seid Muhie and |
| {\v{S}}tajner, Sanja and |
| Riedl, Martin and |
| Biemann, Chris", |
| booktitle = "Proceedings of the International Conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, RANLP 2017", |
| year = "2017", |
| address = "Varna, Bulgaria", |
| url = "https://aclanthology.org/R17-1104/", |
| } |
| ``` |
|
|
| ## Organisers (original shared task) |
|
|
| Sanja Štajner (Mannheim), Chris Biemann (Hamburg), Shervin Malmasi (Harvard Medical School), Gustavo Paetzold (Sheffield), Lucia Specia (Sheffield), Anaïs Tack (UCLouvain / KU Leuven), Seid Muhie Yimam (Hamburg), Marcos Zampieri (Wolverhampton). |
|
|
| Contact: sanja (at) informatik (dot) uni-mannheim (dot) de |
|
|
| ## Licensing |
|
|
| The CWI 2018 shared task data was distributed by the organisers for research use; no explicit redistribution license was attached to the original release. The source text is drawn from English Wikipedia and WikiNews (CC BY-SA 3.0 / CC BY 2.5), German / Spanish / French Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0), and professionally-edited news articles. Downstream users should respect the licenses of the underlying source material and cite the shared task paper. |
|
|
| ## Provenance of this release |
|
|
| - Source archives: `CWI 2018 Training Set.zip` and `CWI 2018 Test Set.zip` as distributed by the shared task organisers. |
| - Conversion: TSV columns mapped 1:1 into parquet with explicit pyarrow schema; row order preserved within each file; no row filtering, deduplication, or text normalisation applied. |
| - Mirror of the raw zips: [alvations/stash · cwi-2018/](https://huggingface.co/datasets/alvations/stash/tree/main/cwi-2018). |
|
|
