英文文本难度自动测量系统的研制与开发

Research and Development of an Automatic English Readability Measuring System

信息化教学条件下实现英文文本难度的自动化测量对于丰富教学资源，优化教学过程，促进外语教学都有着重要意义。该文介绍了一种新型的英文文本难度测量方法，该方法摆脱了传统方法中仅仅依靠词长、句长等变量进行测量的局限，通过英语文本的信息计算实现文本难度的自动测量，实验结果表明该方法的测量准确性明显优于传统方法。此外，还研制开发出面向用户使用的英文文本难度自动测量系统IRMS(Information-based Readability Measuring System)，实现了文本难度的自动测量。

It is of great significance for English teaching and research in the information era to develop an automatic system for measuring English text difficulty. This article presents a new approach， which is different from the former methods. In the traditional methods English text difficulty is measured by the factors such as word length and sentence length， which can not truly reflect the nature of reading and understanding. The new approach presented in this article is based on the natural language processing technologies and large-scale corpus. The text difficulty is measured by information computation， which is realized by N-gram statistical language model. The experiment results show that the new method has a better performance than the former ones in terms of accuracy. This article also briefly introduces the IRMS (Information-based Readability System) system， which can be easily used by language teachers and learners.