Assessing sentence readability for German language learners with broad linguistic modeling or readability formulas: When do linguistic insights make a difference?

Abstract

We present a new state-of-the-art sentence-wise readability assessment model for German L2 readers. We build a linguistically broadly informed machine learning model and compare its performance against four commonly used readability formulas. To understand when the linguistic insights used to inform our model make a difference for readability assessment and when simple readability formulas suffice, we compare their performance based on two common automatic readability assessment tasks: predictive regression and sentence pair ranking. We find that leveraging linguistic insights yields top performances across tasks, but that for the identification of simplified sentences also readability formulas – which are easier to compute and more accessible – can be sufficiently precise. Linguistically informed modeling, however, is the only viable option for high quality outcomes in fine-grained prediction tasks. We then explore the sentence-wise readability profile of leveled texts written for language learners at a beginning, intermediate, and advanced level of German to showcase the valuable insights that sentence-wise readability assessment can have for the adaptation of learning materials and better understand how sentences’ individual readability contributes to larger texts’ overall readability.

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