What Makes Something Hard(er)? Explaining Question Difficulty in Natural Language

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.01627v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Difficulty is one of the most fundamental properties of a question: it determines whether the question can meaningfully discriminate between models of differing ability. Although a variety of methods can now estimate or predict difficulty automatically, they yield only a single descriptive number, with no account of the underlying factors that make a question difficult in the first place. In this work, we propose a data-driven approach that autom