ACL 2013 Predicting and Improving Text Readability for Target Reader Populations

Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Predicting and Improving Text Readability for Target Reader Populations, PITR@EACL 2014, Gothenburg, Sweden, April 27, 2014

Simple, readable sub-sentences

We present experiments using a new unsupervised approach to automatic text simplification, which builds on sampling and ranking via a loss function informed by readability research. The main idea is that a loss function can distinguish good simplification candidates among randomly sampled sub-sentences of the input sentence. Our approach is rated as equally grammatical and beginner reader appro...

Influence of Target Reader Background and Text Features on Text Readability in Bangla: A Computational Approach

In this paper, we have studied the effect of two important factors influencing text readability in Bangla: the target reader and text properties. Accordingly, at first we have built a novel Bangla readability dataset of 135 documents annotated by 50 readers from two different backgrounds. We have identified 20 different features that can affect the readability of Bangla texts; the features were...

Readability Indices for Automatic Evaluation of Text Simplification Systems: A Feasibility Study for Spanish

This paper addresses the problem of automatic evaluation of text simplification systems for Spanish. We test whether already-existing readability formulae would be suitable for this task. We adapt three existing readability indices (two measuring lexical complexity and one measuring syntactic complexity) to be computed automatically, which are then applied to a corpus of original news texts and...

On Improving the Accuracy of Readability Classification using Insights from Second Language Acquisition

We investigate the problem of readability assessment using a range of lexical and syntactic features and study their impact on predicting the grade level of texts. As empirical basis, we combined two web-based text sources, Weekly Reader and BBC Bitesize, targeting different age groups, to cover a broad range of school grades. On the conceptual side, we explore the use of lexical and syntactic ...