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...

To analyze and evaluate textbooks, researchers have either proposed scales and checklists to be filled by teachers and learners or conducted qualitative investigations of the match between SLA theories and textbook activities. This study, however, employs the microstructural approach of schema theory to scrutinize the reading passages of “Mosaic 1 Reading”. To this end, 17 passages of the textb...

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...

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...