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...

OBJECTIVE Informed consent forms that are used prior to administering anaesthesia inform patients before any proposed surgical procedure or treatment. They should provide patients with sufficient information about the operation and treatment. Readibility refers to whether it is easy or hard for a reader to read and understand an available text, and this is evaluated via various formulas. The ai...

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...

Reading is an important means of foreign language acquisition, particularly for vocabulary. Providing reading material that is of a suitable level of difficulty allows users to acquire vocabulary the most efficiently. Thus an on-line reading material recommender system for language learners requires a readability measure so that the difficulty of texts can be automatically assessed. However, mo...

BACKGROUND Health literacy impacts health outcomes. Health literacy is a measure of a person's competence to find, access, contextualize, and understand the information needed to make health decisions. Low levels of health literacy have been associated with poor health status. Health literacy can be enhanced by improving the readability of health literature. Misuse and abuse of prescription med...

In this paper we report the results of a pilot study of basing readability prediction on training data annotated with reading time. Although reading time is known to be a good metric for predicting readability, previous work has mainly focused on annotating the training data with subjective readability scores usually on a 1 to 5 scale. Instead of the subjective assessments of complexity, we use...

Readability assessment can play a role in the evaluation of a simplification algorithm as well as in the identification of what to simplify. While some previous research used traditional readability formulas to evaluate text simplification, there is little research into the utility of readability assessment for identifying and analyzing sentence level targets for text simplification. We explore...