AlphaReadabilityChinese:A Tool for the Measurement of Readability in Chinese Texts and Its Applications
Text readability is an important linguistic feature that has been widely explored in research across various disciplines.While most existing studies have focused on the development of read-ability indices and tools for English texts,research on that for Chinese texts is still in its infancy.In addition,most research used surface features at lexical and syntactic levels and focused on the readability of teaching materials for international Chinese language education and texts by L2 Chinese learners.In this article,we introduce AlphaReadabilityChinese,a text readability tool we have developed for Chinese texts.The tool includes nine indices that measure linguistic fea-tures at lexical,syntactic,and semantic levels and was developed with more sophisticated and ro-bust algorithms.More importantly,the tool serves as a general-purpose tool for the measurement of readability for Chinese texts.In a case study,AlphaReadabilityChinese was used to analyze the works of Jin Yong and Gu Long.The results showed that(1)significant differences exist in readability between the works of these two authors,and(2)the indices included in our tool can effectively differentiate their works.We also discuss possibilities for the application of Al-phaReadabilityChinese in fields such as digital humanities,international Chinese language edu-cation,news and communication studies,information science,and economics and finance.
Chinese languagetext readabilityJin YongGu Longdigital humanities
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
