purpose: the present study seeks to explore the effects of general language proficiency, text readability, and medical knowledge on comprehending medical texts. material & method: 63 medical students in the second year of their study were randomly selected from the english language classes. they answered 100 multiple-choice questions on grammar and vocabulary to establish the level of language ...

This paper presents a novel method for improving the readability of automatic speech recognition (ASR) results for classroom lectures. Because speech in a classroom is spontaneous and contains many ill-formed utterances with various disfluencies, the ASR result should be edited to improve the readability before presenting it to users, by applying some operations such as removing disfluencies, d...

Over 2014, the Cornell University Legal Information Institute and the Australian National University worked with users of the Cornell LII site in a citizen science project to collect over 43,000 crowdsourced assessments of the readability of legal and other sentences. Readers (“citizen scientists”) on legislative pages of the LII site were asked to rate passages from the United States Code and ...

BACKGROUND The objective of this study was to analyse the readability of paediatric oral health education leaflets available in Australia. METHODS Forty paediatric oral health education materials were analysed for general readability according to the following parameters: Thoroughness; Textual framework; Terminology; and Readability (Flesch-Kincaid grade level (FKGL), Gunning Fog index (Fog) ...

BACKGROUND Before participation in medical research an informed consent must be obtained. This study investigates whether the readability of patient information and consent documents (PICDs) corresponds to the average educational level of participants in rheumatological studies in the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway. METHODS 24 PICDs from studies were collected and readability was assessed i...

BACKGROUND Online health information is being used more ubiquitously by the general population. However, this information typically favors only a small percentage of readers, which can result in suboptimal medical outcomes for patients. OBJECTIVE The readability of online patient education materials regarding the topic of congestive heart failure was assessed through six readability assessmen...

Most NLG systems generate texts for readers with good reading ability, but SkillSum adapts its output for readers with poor literacy. Evaluation with lowskilled readers confirms that SkillSum’s knowledge-based microplanning choices enhance readability. We also discuss future readability improvements.

Although understanding health information is important, the texts provided are often difficult to understand. There are formulas to measure readability levels, but there is little understanding of how linguistic structures contribute to these difficulties. We are developing a toolkit of linguistic metrics that are validated with representative users and can be measured automatically. In this st...

In this paper, we propose a new approach to readability assessment with a specific view to the task of text simplification: the intended audience includes people with low literacy skills and/or with mild cognitive impairment. READ–IT represents the first advanced readability assessment tool for what concerns Italian, which combines traditional raw text features with lexical, morpho-syntactic an...

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 ...