An "AI readability" Formula for French as a Foreign Language

Thomas François, Cédrick Fairon

Abstract: This paper present a new readability formula for French as a foreign language (FFL), which relies on 46 textual features representative of the lexical, syntactic, and semantic levels as well as some of the specificities of the FFL context. We report comparisons between several techniques for feature selection and various learning algorithms. Our best model, based on support vector machines (SVM), significantly outperforms previous FFL formulas. We also found that semantic features behave poorly in our case, in contrast with some previous readability studies on English as a first language.