We investigate whether measures of readability can be used to identify age-specific TV programs. Based on a corpus of BBC TV subtitles, we employ a range of linguistic readability features motivated by Second Language Acquisition and Psycholinguistics research. Our hypothesis that such readability features can successfully distinguish between spoken language targeting different age groups is fu...

One way to determine whether consumers understand a document is to use a readability formula to assign it a score.' These formulas calculate readability by counting such variables as the number of words and syllables in a passage or document. The idea of readability formulas has been defined as "an equation which combines those text features that best predict text difficulty. The equation is us...

Language learning, as expressed through word-acquisition and readability, plays an important role in both psycholinguistic theories and information system engineering. We present a statistical model for document readability that is based on the logistic Rasch model and the quantiles of word acquisition age distributions. We exploit this connection to infer the distributions of acquisition ages ...

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.

IMPORTANCE Patients are increasingly using the Internet to supplement finding medical information, which can be complex and requires a high level of reading comprehension. Online ophthalmologic materials from major ophthalmologic associations should be written at an appropriate reading level. OBJECTIVES To assess ophthalmologic online patient education materials (PEMs) on ophthalmologic assoc...

The readability level of a book is a useful measure for children and teenagers (teachers, parents, and librarians, respectively) to identify reading materials suitable for themselves (their K-12 readers, respectively). Unfortunately, majority of published books are assigned a readability level range, such as K-3, instead of a single readability level for their intended readers, by professionals...

Inspired by previous work on crowdsourcing we investigate two different methodologies to assess the readability of a wide variety of text material by implementing two assessment tools. A lightweight crowdsourcing tool which invites users to provide pairwise comparisons and a more advanced version where experts can rank a batch of texts based on readability. In order to validate this approach, r...

We conduct two experiments to investigate how readability (high versus low) and benchmark performance consistency (consistent versus inconsistent) influence investors’ judgments. Using prior management guidance and year-ago quarter performance as two benchmarks against which to assess actual earnings performance, we manipulate whether the valence of guidance performance (positive or negative) a...

This study presents the results of an initial phase of a project seeking to convert texts into a more accessible form for people with autism spectrum disorders by means of text simplification technologies. Random samples of Simple Wikipedia articles are compared with texts from News, Health, and Fiction genres using four standard readability indices (Kincaid, Flesch, Fog and SMOG) and sixteen l...

While previous research on readability has typically focused on document-level measures, recent work in areas such as natural language generation has pointed out the need of sentence-level readability measures. Much of psycholinguistics has focused for many years on processing measures that provide difficulty estimates on a word-by-word basis. However, these psycholinguistic measures have not y...