In this paper we present a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of DEFINDER, a rule-based system that mines consumer-oriented full text articles in order to extract definitions and the terms they define. The quantitative evaluation shows that in terms of precision and recall as measured against human performance, DEFINDER obtained 87% and 75% respectively, thereby revealing the incompletenes...

Well prepared posters are an effective means to communicate a simple message and stimulate discussion. A good poster requires considerable effort in identifying the vital ingredients and rejecting any superfluous material. The conventional structure for papers and abstracts is a suitable basis for posters on many subjects, with modification if necessary. Suitable topics include clinical trials,...

This paper describes our ongoing research project on text simplification for congenitally deaf people. Text simplification we are aiming at is the task of offering a deaf reader a syntactic and lexical paraphrase of a given text for assisting her/him to understand what it means. In this paper, we discuss the issues we should address to realize text simplification and report on the present resul...

We present a low-resource, languageindependent system for text difficulty assessment. We replicate and improve upon a baseline by Shen et al. (2013) on the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) scale. Our work demonstrates that the addition of morphological, information theoretic, and language modeling features to a traditional readability baseline greatly benefits our performance. We use the M...

Despite their significant limitations, readability measures that are easy to apply have definite appeal. With this in mind, we have been exploring the prospects for more insightful measures that are computer-based and, thereby, still easily applied. The orthodox reliance on intrinsic syntactic features is an inherent limitation of most readability measures, since they have no reference to the l...

STUDY DESIGN Analysis of spine-related patient education materials (PEMs) from subspecialty websites. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to assess the readability of spine-related PEMs and compare to readability data from 2008. SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA Many spine patients use the Internet for health information. Several agencies recommend that the readability of online PEMs should be no ...

BACKGROUND Quantitative tools have been developed to evaluate the readability of written documents and have been used in several studies to evaluate information and consent forms. These studies all showed that such documents had a low level of readability. Our objective is to evaluate the readability of Information and Consent Forms (ICFs) used in clinical research. METHODS AND FINDINGS Clini...

INTRODUCTION Older men are at increased risk for prostate cancer. As seniors turn to the Internet for cancer information, it is important that the resources they locate about lifestyle behaviors and screening are culturally appropriate and easy to understand. This study was a comprehensive analysis of prostate cancer risk as portrayed on the Internet with assessment of content readability and c...