Populating a framework for Readability Analysis Word frequency = word difficulty

This paper discusses a computational approach to readability that is expected to lead eventually towards a new and configurable metric for text readability. Our research involves the elaboration, implementation and evaluation of an 8-part framework that requires consideration of both textual and cognitive factors such as language, vocabulary, background knowledge, motivation and cognitive load. We will discuss our work to date that has examined the limitations of current measures of readability and made consideration for how the wider textual and cognitive phenomena may be accounted for. This includes techniques for statistical and linguistic approaches to terminology extraction, approaches to lexical and grammatical simplification and considerations of plain language. Our interest in readability is motivated towards making semantic content more readily available and, as a consequence, improving quality of documents, There are already indications that this work will contribute to a British Standard for readability.