John Lee author Meichun Liu author Tianyuan Cai author 2020-may text English eng European Language Resources Association Marseille, France conference publication 979-10-95546-58-0 This paper presents the first investigation on using semantic frames to assess text difficulty. Based on Mandarin VerbNet, a verbal semantic database that adopts a frame-based approach, we examine usage patterns of ten verbs in a corpus of graded Chinese texts. We identify a number of characteristics in texts at advanced grades: more frequent use of non-core frame elements; more frequent omission of some core frame elements; increased preference for noun phrases rather than clauses as verb arguments; and more frequent metaphoric usage. These characteristics can potentially be useful for automatic prediction of text readability. lee-etal-2020-using https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.framenet-1.8 2020-may 56 62