Readability is defined as the “comprehensibility of written text” [2,3]. It has been measured by various formulae developed for materials written for native speakers of a language (L1), or materials designed for second and/or foreign language students (L2). According to Brown et al. [4], being used with L1 texts, readability formulae provide a numerical index that estimates the reading difficul...

BACKGROUND Patient education materials should be written at a level that is understandable for patients with low health literacy. The aims of this study are (1) to review the literature on readability of ophthalmic patient education materials and (2) to evaluate and revise our institution's patient education materials about glaucoma using evidence-based guidelines on writing for patients with l...

BACKGROUND In the era of new information and communication technologies, the Internet is being increasingly accessed for health-related information. Indeed, recently published patient surveys of people with autoimmune disorders confirmed that the Internet was reported as one of the most important health information sources. Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia launched in 2001, is generally on...

Latest research has shown that the readability of documents plays an important role in information seeking and acquisition, especially for non-domain-expert users. Classical document readability measures are based on surface text features, independent of users. In this paper, we propose to integrate text features with the users’ eye movement features. The latter is expected to reflect a user’s ...

This paper presents a method for improving the readability of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) results for classroom lectures. Most of the previous research on improving the readability of recognition results focused mainly on manually transcribed texts, and not ASR results. Due to the presence of a large number of domain-dependent words and the casual presentation style, even state-of-the-ar...

Accurate readability assessment of health related materials is a critical first step in producing easily understandable consumer health information resources and personal health records. Existing general readability formulas may not always be appropriate for the medical/consumer health domain. We developed a new health-specific readability pilot measure, based on the differences in semantic and...

This paper addresses the task of readability assessment for the texts aimed at second language (L2) learners. One of the major challenges in this task is the lack of significantly sized level-annotated data. For the present work, we collected a dataset of CEFR-graded texts tailored for learners of English as an L2 and investigated text readability assessment for both native and L2 learners. We ...

Data driven approaches to readability analysis for languages other than English has been plagued by a scarcity of suitable corpora. Often, relevant corpora consist only of easy-to-read texts with no rank information or empirical readability scores, making only binary approaches, such as classification, applicable. We propose a Bayesian, latent variable, approach to get the most out of these kin...

In this paper, we present results of our study on age-based categorization of short texts as 85 words per author. We introduce a novel set of features that will reliably work with short texts, and is easy to extract from the text itself without any outside databases. These features were formerly known as variables in readability formulas. We tested datasets presented two age groups children and...

This paper presents experiments with document-level machine translation with readability constraints. We describe the task of producing simplified translations from a given source with the aim to optimize machine translation for specific target users such as language learners. In our approach, we introduce global features that are known to affect readability into a documentlevel SMT decoding fr...