Simplification of Arabic Masterpieces for Extensive Reading

The main objective of the SAMER project is to create a standard and tools for the simplification of modern fiction in Arabic to school-age learners. So far, 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), scaled-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.