# Guidelines for Fine-grained Sentence-level Arabic Readability Annotation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.08674 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08674/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03771/) (2019)
- [AraBERT: Transformer-based Model for Arabic Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00104/) (2020)
- [ARBERT & MARBERT: Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01785/) (2020)
- [The Interplay of Variant, Size, and Task Type in Arabic Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06678/) (2021)
- [ArabicMMLU: Assessing Massive Multitask Language Understanding in Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12840/) (2024)
- [Text Readability Assessment for Second Language Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07580/) (2019)
- [Pushing on Text Readability Assessment: A Transformer Meets Handcrafted Linguistic Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12258/) (2021)
- [Linguistic Features for Readability Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.00377/) (2020)
- [ReadMe++: Benchmarking Multilingual Language Models for Multi-Domain Readability Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14463/) (2023)
- [The SAMER Arabic Text Simplification Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18615/) (2024)
- [Arabic Diacritics in the Wild: Exploiting Opportunities for Improved Diacritization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05760/) (2024)
- [Strategies for Arabic Readability Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03032/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Lemmatization as a Classification Task: Results from Arabic across Multiple Genres](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18399/) (2025)
- [!MSA at BAREC Shared Task 2025: Ensembling Arabic Transformers for Readability Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10040/) (2025)
- [mucAI at BAREC Shared Task 2025: Towards Uncertainty Aware Arabic Readability Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15485/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents the annotation guidelines of the Balanced Arabic Readability Evaluation Corpus (BAREC), a large-scale resource for fine-grained sentence-level readability assessment in Arabic. BAREC includes 69,441 sentences (1M+ words) labeled across 19 levels, from kindergarten to postgraduate. Based on the Taha/Arabi21 framework, the guidelines were refined through iterative training with native Arabic-speaking educators. We highlight key linguistic, pedagogical, and cognitive factors in determining readability and report high inter-annotator agreement: Quadratic Weighted Kappa 81.8% (substantial/excellent agreement) in the last annotation phase. We also benchmark automatic readability models across multiple classification granularities (19-, 7-, 5-, and 3-level). The corpus and guidelines are publicly available.