Enumeration of Reading Ability of Tamil Newspaper and Classification of Writing Style Using Data Mining

This paper makes an attempt to quantify the stylistic characters and readability scores of articles published based on the judgement of the High Court and the Supreme Court regarding the Tamil Nadu Government Employees’ strike published in different dialect newspapers. The articles taken into consideration for this study were published in seven leading Tamil newspapers, namely Dinamalar, Dinamani, Dina Thanthi, Makkal Kural, Dinakaran, Malai Malar and Malai Murasu. Factor analysis establishes the existence of different stylistic characters of the articles considered for this study. Malai Murasu gets the maximum readability scores with the lowest reading age. Dina Thanthi which has the maximum readers in Tamil Nadu gets second rank, followed by Makkal Kural, Dinakaran, Malai Malar and Dinamalar as far as the readability scores are concerned. Dinamani has the lowest readability score with the highest reading age. Application of cluster analysis establishes the existence of three clusters among these seven newspapers. Malai Malar forms a singleton cluster. The next cluster consists of Dina Thanthi, Makkal Kural, Dinakaran and Malai Malar. Finally, Dinamalar and Dinamani form a single cluster.