Tackling Data Drift with Adversarial Validation: An Application for German Text Complexity Estimation

This paper describes the winning approach in the first automated German text complexity assessment shared task as part of KONVENS 2022. To solve this difficult problem, the evaluated system relies on an ensemble of regression models that successfully combines both traditional feature engineering and pre-trained resources. Moreover, the use of adversarial validation is proposed as a method for countering the data drift identified during the development phase, thus helping to select relevant models and features and avoid leaderboard overfitting. The best submission reached 0.43 mapped RMSE on the test set during the final phase of the competition.