Arabic syntactic complexity analyzer

Despite the large and growing number of its speakers, resources for the Arabic language remain lacking.

In the first language writing literature, there is some evidence that writing quality is positively associated with syntactic complexity. Essays receiving higher scores typically incorporate more complex syntactic constructions (such as longer sentences, longer noun phrases) compared to lower-rated essays.

Likewise, it has long been posited that as second language proficiency increases, second language learners produce more complex syntactic structures. These observations have been attested in several languages such as English, French, German, Chinese, and Korean, among others.

However, we still do not know if these results generalize to a language with non-concatenative morphology and a right-to-left writing system such as Modern Standard Arabic. In this project, we used Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to construct and validate an automatic Arabic syntactic complexity analyzer.