@inproceedings{el-haj-rayson-2016-osman,
    title = "{OSMAN} {\textemdash} A Novel {A}rabic Readability Metric",
    author = "El-Haj, Mahmoud  and
      Rayson, Paul",
    editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta  and
      Choukri, Khalid  and
      Declerck, Thierry  and
      Goggi, Sara  and
      Grobelnik, Marko  and
      Maegaard, Bente  and
      Mariani, Joseph  and
      Mazo, Helene  and
      Moreno, Asuncion  and
      Odijk, Jan  and
      Piperidis, Stelios",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC}`16)",
    month = may,
    year = "2016",
    address = "Portoro{\v{z}}, Slovenia",
    publisher = "European Language Resources Association (ELRA)",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/L16-1038/",
    pages = "250--255",
    abstract = "We present OSMAN (Open Source Metric for Measuring Arabic Narratives) - a novel open source Arabic readability metric and tool. It allows researchers to calculate readability for Arabic text with and without diacritics. OSMAN is a modified version of the conventional readability formulas such as Flesch and Fog. In our work we introduce a novel approach towards counting short, long and stress syllables in Arabic which is essential for judging readability of Arabic narratives. We also introduce an additional factor called {\textquotedblleft}Faseeh{\textquotedblright} which considers aspects of script usually dropped in informal Arabic writing. To evaluate our methods we used Spearman`s correlation metric to compare text readability for 73,000 parallel sentences from English and Arabic UN documents. The Arabic sentences were written with the absence of diacritics and in order to count the number of syllables we added the diacritics in using an open source tool called Mishkal. The results show that OSMAN readability formula correlates well with the English ones making it a useful tool for researchers and educators working with Arabic text."
}