Automatic Construction of Large Readability Corpora

This work presents a framework for the automatic construction of large Web corpora classified by readability level. We compare different Machine Learning classifiers for the task of readability assessment focusing on Portuguese and English texts, analysing the impact of variables like the feature inventory used in the resulting corpus. In a comparison between shallow and deeper features, the former already produce F-measures of over 0.75 for Portuguese texts, but the use of additional features results in even better results, in most cases. For English, shallow features also perform well as do classic readability formulas. Comparing different classifiers for the task, logistic regression obtained, in general, the best results, but with considerable differences between the results for two and those for three-classes, especially regarding the intermediary class. Given the large scale of the resulting corpus, for evaluation we adopt the agreement between different classifiers as an indication of readability assessment certainty. As a result of this work, a large corpus for Brazilian Portuguese was built1, including 1.7 million documents and about 1.6 billion tokens, already parsed and annotated with 134 different textual attributes, along with the agreement among the various classifiers.