arXiv AI By Maxim Khovansky, Lev Mukhanov

Quantifying Meaning with SCAPE-T: Semantic Complexity from Encoder-Only Transformer Attention

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The paper introduces SCAPE‑T, an attention‑derived metric for estimating semantic complexity by combining inverse‑weighted self‑focus, CLS focus, and inter‑head redundancy from encoder‑only transformers. It outperforms readability, syntactic/lexical, and LLM‑derived baselines on child and technical text contrasts, achieving 78.5% pairwise accuracy under word‑length control. Ablation studies confirm each submetric’s contribution, and SCAPE‑T generalises to an abstractness dataset, isolating conceptual structure from lexical/syntactic confounds.

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