Text Readability Classification of Textbooks of a Low-Resource Language

There are many languages considered to be low-density languages, either because the population speaking the language is not very large, or because insufficient digitized text material is available in the language even though millions of people speak the language. Bangla is one of the latter ones. Readability classification is an important Natural Language Processing (NLP) application that can be used to judge the quality of documents and assist writers to locate possible problems. This paper presents a readability classifier of Bangla textbook documents based on information-theoretic and lexical features. The features proposed in this paper result in an F-score that is 50% higher than that for traditional readability formulas.