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Proffiliadur: Welsh language text profiling toolkit

Gutiérrez-Rolón, Nicolás, Davies, Jonathan ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6920-4031, Williams, T., Knight, Dawn ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4745-6502 and Alva Manchego, Fernando ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6218-8377 2026. Proffiliadur: Welsh language text profiling toolkit. Presented at: The Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2026), Palma de Mallorca, Spain, 13-15 May 2026. Proceedings of Learning Resources Evaluation Conference 2026 (LREC). ELRA, pp. 1129-1142. 10.63317/5c6yawn79s5h

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Abstract

We introduce Proffiliadur, a Python toolkit for text profiling and readability analysis in Welsh. The toolkit computes 141 surface, lexical, morphological, and syntactic indices, designed to capture linguistic variation while incorporating a Welsh-specific tokenisation process that enables accurate morphological analysis and handles phenomena such as initial consonant mutation. Proffiliadur enables systematic assessment of text accessibility and supports applications in education, healthcare, and public communication. We demonstrate the toolkit’s usefulness through two complementary analyses. First, we examine texts written in accordance with the Cymraeg Clîr ("Clear Welsh") principles and compare them with regular Welsh texts. Second, we analyse texts across CEFR proficiency levels to explore how linguistic complexity varies with learner ability. We also evaluate feature-based and neural classification models for automatic complexity detection, showing that interpretable linguistic indices alone achieve strong predictive performance (F1 = 0.94), comparable to a fine-tuned transformer (F1 = 0.97). Proffiliadur provides the first dedicated text profiling toolkit for Welsh, offering reproducible, linguistically grounded measures of readability for a low-resource language.

Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item - published (Paper)
Date Type: Publication
Status: Published
Schools: Schools > English, Communication and Philosophy
Schools > Computer Science & Informatics
Additional Information: RRS policy applied
Publisher: ELRA
ISBN: 9782493814494
ISSN: 2522-2686
Date of First Compliant Deposit: 5 May 2026
Last Modified: 05 Aug 2026 02:00
URI: https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/184887

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