Coh-Metrix-Esp is a version of Coh-Metrix for Spanish. It can calculate 45 readability indices based on psycholingistics metrics of text cohesion and coherence.

1. Install Freeling

For most of its Natural Language Processing needs, Coh-Metrix-Esp uses Freeling.

If you are using Linux or Windows, follow the instructions here to install the library.

If you are using macOS, you can install Freeling using homebrew (How to install Homebrew?): brew install freeling

2. Build the Freeling Java API

If you are using macOS, you can skip this step since we already include the necessary library file.

This step is required for Coh-Metrix-Esp to be able to use Freeling's functionalities. Please, follow the appropriate instructions for Windows or Linux.

3. Download Coh-Metrix-Esp

Download the coh-metrix-esp.jar file.

Once Coh-Metrix-Esp has been installed, you can run it in the command-line using:

java -jar coh-metrix-esp.jar -i <input_text_file> [-o <output_json_file>]

For example:

java -jar coh-metrix-esp.jar -i testfiles/smallFile.txt

This command will compute the metrics for testfiles/smallFile.txt and save them in a file named output.json by default.

If you want to specify a name and location for the output file, you can use the -o, --outputFile option:

java -jar coh-metrix-esp.jar -i testfiles/smallFile.txt -o /path/to/metricsSmallFile.json

This command will compute the metrics for testfiles/smallFile.txt and save them in /path/to/metricsSmallFile.json.

Coh-Metrix-Esp is licenced under Affero GPL.

If you use Coh-Metrix-Esp in your research, please cite our LREC 2016 paper:

Andre Quispersaravia, Walter Perez, Marco Sobrevilla and Fernando Alva-Manchego. 2016. Coh-Metrix-Esp: A Complexity Analysis Tool for Documents Written in Spanish. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’16), pages 4694-4698, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

@inproceedings{quispesaravia-etal-2016-coh,
    title = "{C}oh-{M}etrix-{E}sp: A Complexity Analysis Tool for Documents Written in {S}panish",
    author = "Quispesaravia, Andre  and
      Perez, Walter  and
      Sobrevilla Cabezudo, Marco  and
      Alva-Manchego, Fernando",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC}'16)",
    month = may,
    year = "2016",
    address = "Portoro{\v{z}}, Slovenia",
    publisher = "European Language Resources Association (ELRA)",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/L16-1745",
    pages = "4694--4698",
    abstract = "Text Complexity Analysis is an useful task in Education. For example, it can help teachers select appropriate texts for their students according to their educational level. This task requires the analysis of several text features that people do mostly manually (e.g. syntactic complexity, words variety, etc.). In this paper, we present a tool useful for Complexity Analysis, called Coh-Metrix-Esp. This is the Spanish version of Coh-Metrix and is able to calculate 45 readability indices. We analyse how these indices behave in a corpus of {``}simple{''} and {``}complex{''} documents, and also use them as features in a complexity binary classifier for texts in Spanish. After some experiments with machine learning algorithms, we got 0.9 F-measure for a corpus that contains tales for kids and adults and 0.82 F-measure for a corpus with texts written for students of Spanish as a foreign language.",
}

We are extremely grateful to Sam Harrison for helping create an installable and runable version of Coh-Metrix-Esp.