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...

We investigate the problem of readability assessment using a range of lexical and syntactic features and study their impact on predicting the grade level of texts. As empirical basis, we combined two web-based text sources, Weekly Reader and BBC Bitesize, targeting different age groups, to cover a broad range of school grades. On the conceptual side, we explore the use of lexical and syntactic ...

Background: Cancer screening rates are lower in Japan than those in western countries. Health professionals publish procancer screening messages on the internet to encourage audiences to undergo cancer screening. However, the information provided is often difficult to read for lay persons. Further, anti-cancer screening activists warn against cancer screening with messages on the Internet. We a...

BACKGROUND The use of electronic health record (EHR) systems with patient engagement capabilities, including viewing, downloading, and transmitting health information, has recently grown tremendously. However, using these resources to engage patients in managing their own health remains challenging due to the complex and technical nature of the EHR narratives. OBJECTIVE Our objective was to d...

Since millions seek health information online, it is vital for this information to be comprehensible. Most studies use readability formulas, which ignore vocabulary, and conclude that online health information is too difficult. We developed a vocabularly-based, naïve Bayes classi­ fier to distinguish between three difficulty levels in text. It proved 98% accurate in a 250-document evaluation. W...

There is a need of matching text difficulty to the expected reading skill of the audience. Readability measures were developed with this objective in mind, first by psycholinguists, and more recently, by practitioners of natural language processing. A common strategy was to extract linguistic features that are good predictors of readability, and then train discriminative classification or regre...

We present a generalizable formal model of software readability based on a human study of 5000 participants. Readability is fundamental to maintenance, but remains poorly understood. Previous models focused on symbol counts of small code snippets. By contrast, we approach code as read on screens by humans and propose to analyze visual, spatial and linguistic features, including structural patte...

This study examined the readability of the AANA Journal, quantifying the effect of peer review on case and research reports published from 1992 to 1994. Gunning and Flesch index-based computer analysis, as well as human comparative analysis, was undertaken. Computer and human assessment of readability revealed improvement as papers evolved from submitted to published versions; however, at publi...