package readability_metrics

readability_metrics

Classic English readability metrics for OCaml, with no dependencies outside the standard library.

let r = Readability_metrics.report "The cat sat on the mat. A dog ran away." in
Format.printf "%a@." Readability_metrics.pp_report r

sentences            2
words                10
letters              28
syllables            11
polysyllabic words   0
long words (>6)      0
flesch reading ease  108.70
flesch-kincaid grade -0.66
gunning fog          2.00
smog                 3.13
coleman-liau         -5.26
automated readability -5.74
lix                  5.00
rix                  0.00
consensus grade      -0.66

What it computes

Plus a consensus_grade, the median of the five grade-scale formulas.

The counting layer is public too, because it is usually the part you actually want to inspect when a score looks wrong: words, sentences, syllables_in_word and a stats record holding letters, words, sentences, syllables, polysyllabic words, Gunning-complex words and long words.

Every formula is exposed twice — flesch_reading_ease : string -> float and flesch_reading_ease_of_stats : stats -> float — so computing eight scores over one document tokenises once.

Install

opam install readability_metrics

Command line

The package installs a readability binary:

$ readability --json < article.txt
{"sentences":41,"words":812,...,"consensus_grade":9.8}

$ readability article.txt draft.txt      # text table, one block per file

Honest limitations

This library is arithmetic over counts, and the counts come from heuristics, not from a parser or a pronunciation dictionary.

• Sentence splitting is punctuation-based. It does not know about abbreviations, so Dr. Who counts as two sentences. Text heavy in abbreviations or decimal numbers will report too many sentences and therefore too low a grade.
• Syllable counting is a vowel-group heuristic. Its systematic error is vowel hiatus: science, create and idea each come out one syllable short. Across a document this is a small downward bias in the syllable count and a slightly optimistic Flesch score. The test suite pins these known-wrong answers deliberately, so behaviour changes show up as failures.
• ASCII only. Bytes ≥ 0x80 are treated as non-letters, so UTF-8 accented characters split words. Adding a Unicode dependency to a package whose job is arithmetic was judged a bad trade; if you need it, normalise the text first.
• SMOG needs ~30 sentences to mean anything. The formula extrapolates from shorter samples but McLaughlin did not calibrate it there.
• Every formula returns nan when the text has no words or no sentences. Check with Float.is_nan.

These are the same limitations the Python textstat and JavaScript text-readability packages carry. The formulas themselves are reproduced exactly as published.

Tests

dune runtest

113 checks: tokeniser and syllable tables against hand-written expectations, each formula against a value computed by hand from a synthetic stats record (so the arithmetic is verified independently of the tokeniser), and properties that must hold for any input — nan on empty text, syllables ≥ words, complex_words ≤ polysyllables, harder prose scoring a higher grade, and no exception on degenerate input.

Provenance

Released by Michal Lip under the ISC licence. The implementation was written with AI assistance (Claude). Each formula was transcribed from its published definition and is checked in the test suite against a value computed by hand from a synthetic stats record, so the arithmetic does not depend on the tokeniser being right. The limitations section above is a list of measured shortcomings, not boilerplate.

Published by the maintainers of BeLikeNative, an English writing assistant.

Licence

ISC. See LICENSE.