A Leveled Reading Corpus of Modern Standard Arabic

Abstract

We present a reading corpus in Modern Standard Arabic to enrich the sparse collection of resources that can be leveraged for educational applications. The corpus consists of textbook material from the curriculum of the United Arab Emirates, spanning all 12 grades (1.4 million tokens) and a collection of 129 unabridged works of fiction (5.6 million tokens) all annotated with reading levels from Grade 1 to Post-secondary. We examine reading progression in terms of lexical coverage, and compare the two sub-corpora (curricular, fiction) to others from clearly established genres (news, legal/diplomatic) to measure representation of their respective genres.

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