Proffiliadur: Welsh Language Text Profiling Toolkit

Nicolás Gutiérrez-Rolón, Jonathan Davies, Tomos Williams, Dawn Knight, Fernando Alva-Manchego


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.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.88
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
1129–1142
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-088
DOI:
10.63317/5c6yawn79s5h
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nicolás Gutiérrez-Rolón, Jonathan Davies, Tomos Williams, Dawn Knight, and Fernando Alva-Manchego. 2026. Proffiliadur: Welsh Language Text Profiling Toolkit. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 1129–1142, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
Proffiliadur: Welsh Language Text Profiling Toolkit (Gutiérrez-Rolón et al., LREC 2026)
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