中文年报可读性:衡量与检验

Readability of Chinese Annual Reports:A Measure and Test

可读性是年报文本特征的一个重要研究方向,围绕这一主题产生了大量研究。但这些研究几乎都基于英文环境展开,而鲜有基于中文环境的相关研究,原因之一可能在于中文年报可读性衡量的困难。无论从动机还是后果角度上看,中文环境下的年报可读性可能都是一个值得研究的问题。有鉴于此,本文在对现有中英文年报可读性指标进行分析的基础上,结合汉语研究的相关成果,构建了三个中文年报可读性衡量指标,并对其做了实证检验。结果表明,年报中每个分句的平均字数、每句话中的副词和连词比例,以及两者的算术平均,是一组较为合理的中文年报可读性衡量指标。进一步的,年报文本长度、年报中数字与表格的数量可能并不能很好的衡量中文年报可读性。本文的这一工作可以为后继相关研究提供一定的基础性参考。

Among the existing researches,the readability of annual reports is an important research direction as one of the text features of annual reports.But almost all of these studies are based on the English environment,while few are based on the Chinese environment.One reason may be the difficulty in measuring the readability of Chinese annual reports.In fact,the readability of annual reports in Chinese environment may be a problem worth studying from the perspective of motive and consequence.In view of this,based on the analysis of the readability indexes of Chinese and English annual reports and the related results of Chinese studies,this paper constructs three indexes to measure the readability of Chinese annual reports and conducts empirical tests on them.The results show that the average word number of each clause,the proportion of adverbs and conjunctions in each sentence,and the arithmetic mean of them are probably a reasonable set of measures for the readability of Chinese annual reports.As measures of the readability of Chinese annual reports,they can better meet the theoretical expectation and are consistent with the relevant research results in the English environment.Further examinations of other text features of Chinese annual reports found that the length of the text and the number of numbers and tables may not be good measures of the readability of Chinese annual reports.This work in this paper can provide some basic reference for the subsequent researches.