Readability indices measure how easy or difficult it is to read and comprehend a text. In this paper we look at the relation between readability indices and web documents from two different perspectives. On the one hand we analyse how to reliably measure the readability of web documents by applying content extraction techniques and incorporating a bias correction. On the other hand we investiga...

In this paper we investigate how readability varies between texts originally written in English and texts translated into English. For quantification, we analyze several factors that are relevant in assessing readability – shallow, lexical and morpho-syntactic features – and we employ the widely used Flesch-Kincaid formula to measure the variation of the readability level between original Engli...

We combine lexical, syntactic, and discourse features to produce a highly predictive model of human readers’ judgments of text readability. This is the first study to take into account such a variety of linguistic factors and the first to empirically demonstrate that discourse relations are strongly associated with the perceived quality of text. We show that various surface metrics generally ex...

All readability research is ultimately concerned with the research question whether it is possible for a prediction system to automatically determine the level of readability of an unseen text. A significant problem for such a system is that readability might depend in part on the reader. If different readers assess the readability of texts in fundamentally different ways, there is insufficient...

BACKGROUND Institutional review boards (IRBs) are charged with safeguarding potential research subjects with limited literacy but may have an inadvertent role in promulgating unreadable consent forms. We hypothesized that text provided by IRBs in informed-consent forms falls short of the IRBs' own readability standards and that readability is influenced by the level of research activity, local ...

with regard to the relationship between the use of modality and readability levels oftexts, 2 opposing views have been raised. the first view endorses direct positiverelationship between modality and readability in the sense that the use of modalityincreases textual understandability. the second view is that the use of modality leadsto an increase in the number of words, resulting in readabilit...

CONTEXT According to the american medical association (AMA) and the national institutes of health (NIH), the recommended readability of patient education materials should be no greater than a sixth-grade reading level. The online patient education information produced by the american academy of orthopaedic surgeons (AAOS) may be too complicated for some patients to understand. This study evalua...

OBJECTIVE To assess the readability of online tracheostomy care resources. STUDY DESIGN Cross-sectional study. SETTING Academic center. SUBJECTS AND METHODS A Google search was performed for "tracheostomy care" in January 2014. The top 50 results were categorized into major versus minor websites and patient-oriented versus professional-oriented resources. These websites were evaluated wit...

BACKGROUND The aim was to evaluate the readability of research information leaflets (RIL) for minors asked to participate in biomedical research studies and to assess the factors influencing this readability. METHODS AND FINDINGS All the pediatric protocols from three French pediatric clinical research units were included (N = 104). Three criteria were used to evaluate readability: length of ...