Word Maturity: Computational Modeling of Word Knowledge

While computational estimation of difficulty of words in the lexicon is useful in many educational and assessment applications, the concept of scalar word difficulty and current corpus-based methods for its estimation are inadequate. We propose a new paradigm called word meaning maturity which tracks the degree of knowledge of each word at different stages of language learning. We present a computational algorithm for estimating word maturity, based on modeling language acquisition with Latent Semantic Analysis. We demonstrate that the resulting metric not only correlates well with external indicators, but captures deeper semantic effects in language.