Abstract
The majority of existing readability measures are designed for English texts. We aim to adapt and test the readability measures on Slovene. We test ten well-known readability formulas and eight additional readability criteria on five types of texts: children’s magazines, general magazines, daily newspapers, technical magazines, and transcriptions of national assembly sessions. As these groups of texts target different audiences, we assume that the differences in writing styles should be reflected in their readability scores. Our analysis shows which readability measures perform well on this task and which fail to distinguish between the groups.
Highlights
IntroductionIn English, the problem of determining text readability (i.e. how easy a text is to understand) has long been a topic of research, with its origins in the 19th century (Sherman 1893)
In English, the problem of determining text readability has long been a topic of research, with its origins in the 19th century (Sherman 1893)
It is likely a different fine-tuning would be needed for other languages, as a.) their education system is different from the US system, and b.) the differences in readability between grade levels are likely to be different between languages, meaning that each language would require tuned parameters. –– Some measures utilize a list of common English words and their results depend on the definition of this list
Summary
In English, the problem of determining text readability (i.e. how easy a text is to understand) has long been a topic of research, with its origins in the 19th century (Sherman 1893). There has been little research on readability of languages other than English, we aim to apply these measures to Slovene and evaluate how well they perform. It is likely a different fine-tuning would be needed for other languages, as a.) their education system is different from the US system, and b.) the differences in readability between grade levels are likely to be different between languages, meaning that each language would require tuned parameters. For Slovene, there currently does not exist a publicly available list of common words, so it is not known how such measures would perform. –– The existing readability measures do not use the morphological information to determine difficult words but rely on syllable and character counts, or a list of difficult words. As Slovene is morphologically much more complex than English, words with complex morphology are harder to understand than those with simple morphology, even if they have the same number of characters or syllables
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