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

arXiv:2610.33441v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated semantic complexity estimation remains underexplored in NLP, despite important applications in linguistics and interpretability. This paper defines semantic complexity as the code length required to uniquely specify a text's semantic meaning, and operationalises it via SCAPE-T, an attention-derived metric based on encoder-only transformers. Existing measures either model reader effort (readability, lexical difficulty), which correlates with surface features (word length, syntax), or quantify surface features directly (type-token ratio, word frequency). SCAPE-T targets semantic integration directly by combining three submetrics: (i) inverse-weighted self-focus (token-to-self), (ii) CLS focus (token-to-CLS), and (iii) inter-head redun