Simple or Complex? Assessing the readability of Basque Texts

Abstract

In this paper we present a readability assessment system for Basque, ErreXail, which is going to be the preprocessing module of a Text Simplification system. To that end we compile two corpora, one of simple texts and another one of complex texts. To analyse those texts, we implement global, lexical, morphological, morpho-syntactic, syntactic and pragmatic features based on other languages and specially considered for Basque. We combine these feature types and we train our classifiers. After testing the classifiers, we detect the features that perform best and the most predictive ones.