The Whole is Greater than the Sum of its Parts: Towards the Effectiveness of Voting Ensemble Classifiers for Complex Word Identification.

In this paper, we present an effective system using voting ensemble classifiers to detect contextually complex words for non-native English speakers. To make the final decision, we channel a set of eight calibrated classifiers based on lexical, size and vocabulary features and train our model with annotated datasets collected from a mixture of native and non-native speakers. Thereafter, we test our system on three datasets namely News, WikiNews, and Wikipedia and report competitive results with an F1-Score ranging between 0.777 to 0.855 for each of the datasets. Our system outperforms multiple other models and falls within 0.042 to 0.026 percent of the best-performing model’s score in the shared task.