Readability of Bangla News Articles for Children

PACLIC 28 !309 Readability of Bangla News Articles for Children Zahurul Islam and Rashedur Rahman AG Texttechnology Institut f¨ur Informatik Goethe-Universit¨at Frankfurt zahurul@em.uni-frankfurt.de, kamol.sustcse@gmail.com Abstract Many news papers publish articles for chil- dren. Journalists use their experience and in- tuition to write these. They might not aware of readability of articles they write. There is no evaluation tool or method available to deter- mine how appropriate these articles are for the target readers. In this paper, we evaluate dif- ficulty of Bangla news articles that are written for children. 1 Introduction News is the communication of selected information on current events (Shirky, 2009). This communi- cation is shared by various mediums such as print, online and broadcasting. A newspaper is a printed publication that contains news and other informative articles. There are many newspapers that are also published online. Due to the rapid growth of internet use, it is very common that more people read news online nowadays than before. Newspapers try to tar- get certain audience through different topics and sto- ries. Children are also in their target audience. This target group is their future reader. Nowadays children also read news online. One third of children in developed countries such as Netherlands, United Kingdoms and Belgium browse internet for news (De Cock, 2012; De Cock and Hautekiet, 2012). Another study by Livingstone et al. (2010) showed that one fourth of the British chil- dren between age of nine and nineteen look for news on the internet. The ratio could be similar in other developed countries where most of the citizen have access over the internet. The number of internet users also increasing in developing countries such as Bangladesh and In- dia. According to the English Wikipedia1, more than thirty three million people in Bangladesh use internet and many of them read news online. Also the Alexa index2 shows that three Bangla news sites are in the list of ten most visited websites from Bangladesh. All newspapers contain a variety of sections. These sections are based on different news topics. Some of the them are specific to children. The news for children will vary linguistically and cognitively than news for adults. This characteristic is similar to the websites dedicated for children. De Cock and Heutekiet (2012) observed difficulties for children to navigate these websites. Readability of the texts is one of the reasons. There is no specific guideline for writing texts for this target group. Journalists use their experience and intuition while writing. How- ever, a text that is very easy to understand for an adult reader could be very difficult for a child. This difficulty motivate children readers to skip the news- paper in future. The readability of a text relates to how easily human readers can process and understand a text. There are many text related factors that influence the readability of a text. These factors include very sim- ple features such as type face, font size, text vocab- ulary as well as complex features like grammatical conciseness, …

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