Readability assessment of written Adyghe using a baseline approach

The study introduces a cross-linguistic approach extending the English-based Flesch Reading Ease formula for the assessment of Adyghe texts' readability level.The method relies on the corpus-based analysis of Adyghe shallow linguistic features, i.e. syllable length, word count, and sentence length.It allows to adjust the Flesch formula in accordance with these features by means of natural language processing (NLP) and corpus data analysis.Preliminary results showed that the adapted formula could overall adequately differentiate texts according to their complexity levels although it lacked precision in distinguishing between texts belonging to the same complexity range.The approach can be easily extended to other typologically different minority languages subject to their corpora size and availability.