@inproceedings{tanprasert-kauchak-2021-flesch,
    title = "Flesch-Kincaid is Not a Text Simplification Evaluation Metric",
    author = "Tanprasert, Teerapaun  and
      Kauchak, David",
    editor = "Bosselut, Antoine  and
      Durmus, Esin  and
      Gangal, Varun Prashant  and
      Gehrmann, Sebastian  and
      Jernite, Yacine  and
      Perez-Beltrachini, Laura  and
      Shaikh, Samira  and
      Xu, Wei",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics (GEM 2021)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.gem-1.1",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.gem-1.1",
    pages = "1--14",
    abstract = "Sentence-level text simplification is currently evaluated using both automated metrics and human evaluation. For automatic evaluation, a combination of metrics is usually employed to evaluate different aspects of the simplification. Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL) is one metric that has been regularly used to measure the readability of system output. In this paper, we argue that FKGL should not be used to evaluate text simplification systems. We provide experimental analyses on recent system output showing that the FKGL score can easily be manipulated to improve the score dramatically with only minor impact on other automated metrics (BLEU and SARI). Instead of using FKGL, we suggest that the component statistics, along with others, be used for posthoc analysis to understand system behavior.",
}