On the Contribution of MWE-based Features to a Readability Formula for French as a Foreign Language

This study aims to assess the usefulness of multi-word expressions (MWEs) as features for a readability formula that predicts the difficulty of texts for French as a foreign language. Using a MWE extractor combining a statistical approach with a linguistic filter, we define 11 predictors. These take into account the density and the probability of MWEs, but also their internal structure. Our experiments show that the predictive power of these 11 variables is low and that a simple approach based on the average probability of n-grams is more effective.