  We present the SAMER Corpus, the first manually annotated Arabic parallel
corpus for text simplification targeting school-aged learners. Our corpus
comprises texts of 159K words selected from 15 publicly available Arabic
fiction novels most of which were published between 1865 and 1955. Our corpus
includes readability level annotations at both the document and word levels, as
well as two simplified parallel versions for each text targeting learners at
two different readability levels. We describe the corpus selection process, and
outline the guidelines we followed to create the annotations and ensure their
quality. Our corpus is publicly available to support and encourage research on
Arabic text simplification, Arabic automatic readability assessment, and the
development of Arabic pedagogical language technologies.
