analog of flesch-kincaid to measure readability of chinese texts?

[student]

Measures of readability of English texts are provided by the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease and Grade Level formulae. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch-Kincaid_readability_test The grade level test is built into MS Word, making it readily available.

Is there an analog measure of reading difficulty for Chinese texts?

[gato]

I do not think one exists yet in Chinese. Maybe we can invent one. Sentence length is certainly one relevant factor, just as it is in English. Level of vocabulary is another.

[c_redman]

I don't know of any products, but there are two studies I know of.

1. 1 LEXGUIDE-2003 A GUIDE TO THE LEXICAL ANALYSIS OF NATURAL TEXTS ...

In a nutshell, the LEX score is a calculated difficulty, and is mainly related to the word frequencies in a text compared with its frequency in a large reference corpus. So, a text with a higher usage of rare words would have a higher score.

2. Sentence difficulty evaluation for a learner's dictionary

This study was with Chinese texts, estimating their difficulty based on different factors and comparing them with user-ranked difficulties. It turned out that sentence length, word frequency from a reference corpus, and number of definitions of each word (polysemy), were the main factors. More interesting was that ignoring the words and calculating based on just the characters had a higher correlation.