Studies have shown that modern methods of readability assessment, using automated linguistic analysis and machine learning (ML), is a viable road forward for readability classification and ranking. In this paper we present a study of different levels of analysis and a large number of features and how they affect an ML-system’s accuracy when it comes to readability assessment. We test a large nu...

Although many approaches have been presented to compute and predict readability of documents in different languages, the information provided by readability systems often fail to show in a clear and understandable way how difficult a document is and which aspects contribute to content readability. We address this issue by presenting a system that, for a given document in Italian, provides not o...

OBJECTIVE To review studies on the readability of package leaflets of medicinal products for human use. METHODS We conducted a systematic literature review between 2008 and 2013 using the keywords "Readability and Package Leaflet" and "Readability and Package Insert" in the academic search engine Biblioteca do Conhecimento Online, comprising different bibliographic resources/databases. The pref...

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...

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...

Multiple dispatch allows determining the actual method to be executed, depending on the dynamic types of its arguments. Although some programming languages provide multiple dispatch, most widespread object-oriented languages lack this feature. Therefore, different implementation techniques are commonly used to obtain multiple dispatch in these languages. We evaluate the existing approaches, pre...

SIMPLIFICA is an authoring tool for producing simplified texts in Portuguese. It provides functionalities for lexical and syntactic simplification and for readability assessment. This tool is the first of its kind for Portuguese; it brings innovative aspects for simplification tools in general, since the authoring process is guided by readability assessment based on the levels of literacy of th...

We present an initial study examining the benefits of incorporating readability indicators in social network-related tasks. In order to do so, we introduce TweetRead, a readability assessment tool specifically designed for Twitter and use it to inform the hashtag prediction process, highlighting the importance of a readability signal in recommendation tasks.

An inter-rater agreement study is performed for readability assessment in Bengali. A 1-7 rating scale was used to indicate different levels of readability. We obtained moderate to fair agreement among seven independent annotators on 30 text passages written by four eminent Bengali authors. As a by product of our study, we obtained a readability-annotated ground truth dataset in Bengali.

We present an initial examination on the impact text complexity has when incorporated into the recommendation process in community question answering sites. We use Read2Vec, a readability assessment tool designed to measure the readability level of short documents, to inform a traditional content-based recommendation strategy. The results highlight the benefits of incorporating readability info...