On readability evaluation of multimodal texts from Russian Universities websites (based on the PolyLing corpus)

M. S. Kogan, D. A. Gavrilik, S. V. Chistyakova, A. V. Rubtsova, E. R. Nikulina, A. V. Cherkas, M. V. Bolsunovskaya

Abstract


University websites being complex multimodal structures are very important in modern educational environment: being the central element of the University’s electronic information and educational environment, they play part of intermediary between University and the outer world and a powerful University image-maker’s tool. Multimodal university websites draw researchers’ attention since their appearance in the 1990s. However, the analysis of studies on University websites has revealed that very few of them focused on the websites’ readability. This paper focusing on evaluating readability of leading Russian university websites aims to partially bridge this gap. To achieve the goal, at the first stage of the project a corpus of 1000+ texts was built by parsing news sections of pre-selected websites. The automatic cluster analysis was used to determine the main themes of the built corpus named PolyLing. The texts’ readability was evaluated both automatically with Python script based on classical readability indices and by 132 human assessors who evaluated a representative sample of the corpus according to 10 criteria belonging to three groups (linguistic, structural and logical, and appealing) through completing a specially- designed questionnaire. The correlation analysis showed a satisfactory agreement for texts of middle difficulty and a negative correlation for easier and more difficult texts between the automatic and respondents’ estimates. The paper proposes possible explanation for this divergence and outlines further research.

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References


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