New Readability Measures for Bangla and Hindi Texts

In this paper we present computational models to compute readability of Indian language text documents. We first demonstrate the inadequacy and the consequent inapplicability of some of the popular readability metrics in English to Hindi and Bangla. Next, we present user experiments to identify important structural parameters of Bangla and Hindi that affect readability of texts in these two languages. Accordingly, we propose two different readability models for each Bangla and Hindi. The models are tested against a second round of user studies with completely new set of data. The results validate the propose models. Compared to the handful of existing works in Hindi and Bangla text readability, this paper presents the first ever definitive readability models for these languages incorporating their salient structural features.