Graph-based Coherence Modeling For Assessing Readability

Readability depends on many factors ranging from shallow features like word length to semantic ones like coherence. We introduce novel graph-based coherence features based on frequent subgraphs and compare their ability to assess the readability of Wall Street Journal articles. In contrast to Pitler and Nenkova (2008) some of our graph-based features are significantly correlated with human judgments. We outperform Pitler and Nenkova (2008) in the readability ranking task by more than 5% accuracy thus establishing a new state-of-the-art on this dataset.