A text mining approach to the text difficulty of Latin American peace agreement

Abstract

A peace agreement was recently subjected to a plebiscite as a solution to finish the Colombian armed conflict. With 62.57% of abstention, 18.44% of the Colombian electorate rejected this agreement. This paper aims to propose a methodological approach that shows how to linguistically analyze peace agreements as political products that are acceptable or not according to their text difficulty. Given the socio-political similarities of the armed conflicts of Colombia, Guatemala, and El Salvador, we scrutinized with sufficient computational detail these peace agreements. The results revealed that the text difficulty of these accords was more appropriate for a person with at least 19 years of education, suggesting that these sort of texts are not written for broader and less-educated audiences.