Efficiency of text readability features in Russian academic texts

Abstract

© 2018 Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Gumanitarnyi Universitet.All Rights Reserved. This paper addresses the problem of readability assessment for Russian texts and investigates the impact of 24 lexical, syntactic and frequency features. The research was conducted on Russian Readability Corpus containing two sub-corpora, two sets of 5–11 grade level textbooks on Social studies for native speakers of Russian. The sub-corpora were collected for research purposes, annotated and marked as BOG and NIK. The application of the Ridge regression has demonstrated the connection between readability and average sentence length, average number of coordinating chains, average number of sub-trees, frequency and lexical features. The results of the study have the potential to be applied in a wide variety of areas including primarily education, as well as webpage design, document management.