Arabic Readability Research: Current State and Future Directions

We provide a perspective on the current state of Arabic readability assessment research with the objective of considering directions and opportunities for future research. We review and assess the current state of progress in Arabic readability assessment, briefly surveying research that has been performed on texts targeted at different populations: readers of Arabic as L1, adult readers in non-academic settings, and readers of Arabic as L2. Arabic readability assessment has followed trends in other languages, primarily English, but has faced challenges due to the specificities of Arabic and the relative scarcity of available corpora and tools, compared to languages with richer resources. We also consider whether readability assessment for Arabic should take into consideration the special situation of diglossia that exists in all Arab countries.