Readability is a crucial characteristic of texts, greatly influencing comprehension and reading efficacy. Unfortunately, limited research is available for less-resourced languages, especially for young populations where its impact is even higher. This paper introduces a new readability tool for children’s literature in the Romanian language, explicitly targeting primary school students aged 7-11. The tool consists of a digital repository of school reading texts (self-compiled corpus) and a text analysis interface that generates automatic readability reports for uploaded short texts. The methodology involves extracting, testing, and calibrating a readability formula for Romanian using the children’s literature corpus. Related work on readability and readability tools is discussed, followed by a description of the children’s literature corpus and the platform functionalities. The first steps are presented towards validating the readability formula for children’s literature in Romanian using the ReaderBench framework, while calibration variables relevant to the Romanian language and children’s literature are examined. Currently, no existing platform integrates a research-based readability formula for the Romanian language, making this tool unique. Overall, this research contributes to applied corpus linguistics and Digital Humanities studies and offers a valuable resource for educators, parents, and children in accessing age-appropriate and readable texts.

This paper presents the methodology and data used for the automatic extraction of the Romanian Academic Word List (Ro-AWL). Academic Word Lists are useful in both L2 and L1 teaching contexts. For the Romanian language, no such resource exists so far. Ro-AWL has been generated by combining methods from corpus and computational linguistics with L2 academic writing approaches. We use two types of data: (a) existing data, such as the Romanian Frequency List based on the ROMBAC corpus, and (b) self-compiled data, such as the expert academic writing corpus EXPRES. For constructing the academic word list, we follow the methodology for building the Academic Vocabulary List for the English language. The distribution of Ro-AWL features (general distribution, POS distribution) into four disciplinary datasets is in line with previous research. Ro-AWL is freely available and can be used for teaching, research and NLP applications.

The present paper aims to describe the collection of ParlaMint-RO corpus and to analyse several trends in parliamentary debates (plenary sessions of the Lower House) held in between 2000 and 2020). After a short description of the data collection (of existing transcripts), the workflow of data processing (text extraction, conversion, encoding, linguistic annotation), and an overview of the corpus, the paper will move on to a multi-layered linguistic analysis to validate interdisciplinary perspectives. We use computational methods and corpus linguistics approaches to scrutinize the future tense forms used by Romanian speakers, in order to create a data-supported profile of the parliamentary group strategies and planning.

Field Specific Expert Scientific Writing in English as a Lingua Franca is essential for the effective research networking and dissemination worldwide. Extracting the linguistic profile of the research articles written in L2 English can help young researchers and expert scholars in various disciplines adapt to the scientific writing norms of their communities of practice. In this exploratory study, we present and test an automated linguistic assessment model that includes features relevant for the cross-disciplinary second language framework: Text Complexity Analysis features, such as Syntactic and Lexical Complexity, and Field Specific Academic Word Lists. We analyse how these features vary across four disciplinary fields (Economics, IT, Linguistics and Political Science) in a corpus of L2-English Expert Scientific Writing, part of the EXPRES corpus (Corpus of Expert Writing in Romanian and English). The variation in field specific writing is also analysed in groups of linguistic features extracted from the higher visibility (Hv) versus lower visibility (Lv) journals. After applying lexical sophistication, lexical variation and syntactic complexity formulae, significant differences between disciplines were identified, mainly that research articles from Lv journals have higher lexical complexity, but lower syntactic complexity than articles from Hv journals; while academic vocabulary proved to have discipline specific variation.