Background: Cancer screening rates are lower in Japan than those in western countries. Health professionals publish procancer screening messages on the internet to encourage audiences to undergo cancer screening. However, the information provided is often difficult to read for lay persons. Further, anti-cancer screening activists warn against cancer screening with messages on the Internet. We a...

There are currently two streams that dominate the research on knowledge federation: The one is the trend towards Linked Data, leading to fine-grained structuring of information that is machine readable; The other is the reuse and co-creation of information that spreads the burden of its creation to the public and enables the availability of large knowledge corpora. In this contribution we outli...

BACKGROUND The use of electronic health record (EHR) systems with patient engagement capabilities, including viewing, downloading, and transmitting health information, has recently grown tremendously. However, using these resources to engage patients in managing their own health remains challenging due to the complex and technical nature of the EHR narratives. OBJECTIVE Our objective was to d...

Since millions seek health information online, it is vital for this information to be comprehensible. Most studies use readability formulas, which ignore vocabulary, and conclude that online health information is too difficult. We developed a vocabularly-based, naïve Bayes classi­ fier to distinguish between three difficulty levels in text. It proved 98% accurate in a 250-document evaluation. W...

There is a need of matching text difficulty to the expected reading skill of the audience. Readability measures were developed with this objective in mind, first by psycholinguists, and more recently, by practitioners of natural language processing. A common strategy was to extract linguistic features that are good predictors of readability, and then train discriminative classification or regre...

We present a generalizable formal model of software readability based on a human study of 5000 participants. Readability is fundamental to maintenance, but remains poorly understood. Previous models focused on symbol counts of small code snippets. By contrast, we approach code as read on screens by humans and propose to analyze visual, spatial and linguistic features, including structural patte...

This study examined the readability of the AANA Journal, quantifying the effect of peer review on case and research reports published from 1992 to 1994. Gunning and Flesch index-based computer analysis, as well as human comparative analysis, was undertaken. Computer and human assessment of readability revealed improvement as papers evolved from submitted to published versions; however, at publi...

A Discharge Summary provides critical information to patients for managing their post-discharge care. This study analyzes the characteristics of a corpus of Electronic Discharge Summaries (EDSs) with respect to content and readability of its sections in terms of text length and grade level complexity, use of abbreviations and noun phrase complexity based on the Open Access Consumer Health Vocab...