BACKGROUND Health literacy impacts health outcomes. Health literacy is a measure of a person's competence to find, access, contextualize, and understand the information needed to make health decisions. Low levels of health literacy have been associated with poor health status. Health literacy can be enhanced by improving the readability of health literature. Misuse and abuse of prescription med...

In this paper we report the results of a pilot study of basing readability prediction on training data annotated with reading time. Although reading time is known to be a good metric for predicting readability, previous work has mainly focused on annotating the training data with subjective readability scores usually on a 1 to 5 scale. Instead of the subjective assessments of complexity, we use...

Readability assessment can play a role in the evaluation of a simplification algorithm as well as in the identification of what to simplify. While some previous research used traditional readability formulas to evaluate text simplification, there is little research into the utility of readability assessment for identifying and analyzing sentence level targets for text simplification. We explore...

We propose a novel algorithm for sentiment summarization that takes account of informativeness and readability, simultaneously. Our algorithm generates a summary by selecting and ordering sentences taken from multiple review texts according to two scores that represent the informativeness and readability of the sentence order. The informativeness score is defined by the number of sentiment expr...

The paper investigates the problem of sentence readability assessment, which is modelled as a classification task, with a specific view to text simplification. In particular, it addresses two open issues connected with it, i.e. the corpora to be used for training, and the identification of the most effective features to determine sentence readability. An existing readability assessment tool dev...

The development of the internet has facilitated the flow of information. However, this explosive growth of information has led to fundamental importance being overlooked: Reading material can be understood. Research on readability formulas aims to predict, to a reasonable extent, the degree to which a text can be understood. It does so mainly by analyzing and translating the information within ...

In general, people read texts and decide by themselves to measure levels of understandability and readability, which takes a lot of time and efforts. We believe visualizing readability gives intuitive impact on how difficult the texts will be before examining the texts further. Text visualization aims to provide structural characteristics of text contents in an efficient way. By using massive t...

We introduce the graph parameter readability and study it as a function of the number of vertices in a graph. Given a digraph D, an injective overlap labeling assigns a unique string to each vertex such that there is an arc from x to y if and only if x properly overlaps y. The readability of D is the minimum string length for which an injective overlap labeling exists. In applications that util...

AIM To evaluate the quality and accuracy of websites written to the public on inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) (Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis) and assess their readability level. METHODS Google™, Bing™, and Yahoo™ search engines were searched independently by three researchers in December 2014. Only English-language websites were selected on the basis of predetermined inclusion and e...

Background The patient package inserts (PPIs), which contain the necessary information about medications intended for patients, need to be expressed in a clear language comprehensible to everyone. Objective This study aimed to evaluate the readability and understandability of the drug package inserts for the inexpert people. Methods The readability of the 158 PPIs of the 33 drugs, registere...