For German readability assessment, however, little progress has been made in recent years, despite a series of promising results published around the turn of the decade (Vor der Brück et al., 2008;Hancke et al., 2012).
german readability research has suffered from the lack of a shared reference corpus and sufficiently comparable corpora for cross-corpus testing of readability models: While for English research, the Common Core corpus consisting of examples from the English Language Arts Standards of the Common Core State Standards, and the WeeklyReader corpus of online news articles have been widely used in studies on English readability and text simplification (Vajjala and Meurers, 2014;Petersen and Ostendorf, 2009;Feng et al., 2010), there are no comparable resources for german.