Automatic Readability Measurements of the Arabic Text: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

There has been a lot of research in the field of text readability since the 1920s. This research has led to many popular readability formulas and effective readability tools with useful applications in English, Spanish, and French. To the best of our knowledge, there has been little research on Arabic readability, and almost no research on automatic Arabic readability measurements. This paper is designed to review the literature on different readability research (whether traditional or automatic) and to present the development of a prototype tool to automate the task of measuring Arabic text readability using machine learning techniques. Preliminary evaluation results along with future directions of such research are presented.