tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "Cognitively Motivated Features for Readability Assessment"

We investigate linguistic features that correlate with the readability of texts for adults with intellectual disabilities (ID). Based on a corpus of texts (including some experimentally measured for comprehension by adults with ID), we analyze the significance of novel discourselevel features related to the cognitive factors underlying our users’ literacy challenges. We develop and evaluate a tool for automatically rating the readability of texts for these users. Our experiments show that our discourselevel, cognitively-motivated features improve automatic readability assessment | Cognitively Motivated Features for Readability Assessment Noémie Elhadad Columbia University New York NY USA noemie@ Lijun Feng The City University of New York Graduate Center New York NY USA Matt Huenerfauth The City University of New York Queens College Graduate Center New York NY USA matt@ Abstract We investigate linguistic features that correlate with the readability of texts for adults with intellectual disabilities ID . Based on a corpus of texts including some experimentally measured for comprehension by adults with ID we analyze the significance of novel discourselevel features related to the cognitive factors underlying our users literacy challenges. We develop and evaluate a tool for automatically rating the readability of texts for these users. Our experiments show that our discourselevel cognitively-motivated features improve automatic readability assessment. 1 Introduction Assessing the degree of readability of a text has been a field of research as early as the 1920 s. Dale and Chall define readability as the sum total including all the interactions of all those elements within a given piece of printed material that affect the success a group of readers have with it. The success is the extent to which they understand it read it at optimal speed and find it interesting Dale and Chall 1949 . It has long been acknowledged that readability is a function of text characteristics but also of the readers themselves. The literacy skills of the readers their motivations background knowledge and other internal characteristics play an important role in determining whether a text is readable for a particular group of people. In our work we investigate how to assess the readability of a text for people with intellectual disabilities ID . Previous work in automatic readability assessment has focused on generic features of a text at the lexical and syntactic level. While such features are essential we argue that .