The main objective of the SAMER project is to create standards and tools for the simplification of modern fiction in Arabic to school-age learners. The project has developed a five-level prototypical readability scale. It then produced a curated Arabic readability list from a general-purpose corpus of Arabic (half news and half fiction), scale-graded it based on frequency of occurrence in the corpus, then had it manually annotated in triplicate by language professionals from three dialectal regions in the Arab world. In the next stage, the project drew on the generated readability list in designing and publishing a 36k-word Readability-leveled Thesaurus for Arabic and building a Simplification Interface platform as an extension to Google Docs. In the last stage, the system was used to simplify fifteen 10k-word texts from Arabic fictional masterpieces to produce a readability graded corpus of modern Arabic fiction.

The SAMER Project was funded by a New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) Research Enhancement Fund.

Publications

• Al Khalil, M., Habash, N., & Saddiki, H. (2017). Simplification of Arabic Masterpieces for Extensive Reading: A Project Overview. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Arabic Computational Linguistics (ACLing 2017), Dubai, United Arab Emirates. [PDF]

• Al Khalil, M., Saddiki, H., Habash, N., Alfalasi, L. (2018). A Leveled Reading Corpus of Modern Standard Arabic. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-2018). [PDF]

• Saddiki, H., Habash, N., Cavalli-Sforza, V., & Al Khalil, M. (2018). Feature Optimization for Predicting Readability of Arabic L1 and L2. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Natural Language Processing Techniques for Educational Applications. [PDF]

• Al Khalil, M., Habash, N., & Jiang, Z. (2020). A Large-Scale Leveled Readability Lexicon for Standard Arabic. The 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020, Marseille, France) [PDF]

• Jiang, Z. & Habash, N. & Al Khalil, M. (2020). An Online Readability Leveled Arabic Thesaurus. Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. [PDF]

• Hazim, R., Saddiki, H., Alhafni, B., Al Khalil, M., Habash, N. (2022). Arabic Word-level Readability Visualization for Assisted Text Simplification. Proceedings of The 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations. Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. [PDF] 

Presentations

• Habash, Nizar, Muhamed Al Khalil, Hind Saddiki, Zhengyang Jiang, Reem Hazim, Bashar Alhafni. (2023). Arabic Automatic Readability Resources in the SAMER Project. The 1st workshop on Readability for Low Resourced Languages. [PDF]