Ablesbarkeitsmesser: A System for Assessing the Readability of German Text

While several approaches have been proposed for estimating the readability of English texts, there is much less work for other languages. In this paper, we present an online service, available at https://readability- check.org/, that provides five well-established statistical methods and two machine learning models for measuring the readability of texts in German. For the machine learning methods, we train two BERT models. To bring all the measures together, we provide an interactive website that allows users to evaluate the readability of German texts at the sentence level. Our research can be useful for anyone who wants to know whether the text content at hand is easy or difficult and therefore can be used in certain situations or rather needs to be adapted and improved. In education, for example, it can help to assess the suitability of a particular teaching material for a particular grade.