[go: up one dir, main page]
More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/ skip to main content
10.5555/1609067.1609092dlproceedingsArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageseaclConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article
Free access

Cognitively motivated features for readability assessment

Published: 30 March 2009 Publication History

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 discourse-level 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 discourse-level, cognitively-motivated features improve automatic readability assessment.

References

[1]
Alias-i. 2008. LingPipe 3.6.0. http://alias-i.com/lingpipe (accessed October 1, 2008)
[2]
Barzilay, R., Elhadad, N., 2003. Sentence alignment for monolingual comparable corpora. In Proc EMNLP, pp. 25--32.
[3]
Barzilay R., Lapata, M., 2008. Modeling Local Coherence: An Entity-based Approach. Computational Linguistics. 34(1):1--34.
[4]
Carroll, J., Minnen, G., Pearce, D., Canning, Y., Devlin, S., Tait, J. 1999. Simplifying text for language-impaired readers. In Proc. EACL Poster, p. 269.
[5]
Chall, J. S., Dale, E., 1995. Readability Revisited: The New Dale-Chall Readability Formula. Brookline Books, Cambridge, MA.
[6]
Charniak, E. 2000. A maximum-entropy-inspired parser. In Proc. NAACL, pp. 132--139.
[7]
Collins-Thompson, K., and Callan, J. 2004. A language modeling approach to predicting reading difficulty. In Proc. NAACL, pp. 193--200.
[8]
Dale, E. and J. S. Chall. 1949. The concept of readability. Elementary English 26(23).
[9]
Davison, A., and Kantor, R. 1982. On the failure of readability formulas to define readable texts: A case study from adaptations. Reading Research Quarterly, 17(2):187--209.
[10]
Drew, C. J., and Hardman, M. L. 2004. Mental retardation: A lifespan approach to people with intellectual disabilities (8th ed.). Columbus, OH: Merrill.
[11]
Flesch, R. 1948. A new readability yardstick. Journal of Applied Psychology, 32:221--233.
[12]
Fowler, A. E. 1998. Language in mental retardation. In Burack, Hodapp, and Zigler (Eds.), Handbook of Mental Retardation and Development. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, pp. 290--333.
[13]
Frazier, L. 1985. Natural Language Parsing: Psychological, Computational, and Theoretical Perspectives, chapter Syntactic complexity, pp. 129--189. Cambridge University Press.
[14]
Galley, M., McKeown, K. 2003. Improving Word Sense Disambiguation in Lexical Chaining. In Proc. IJCAI, pp. 1486--1488.
[15]
Gunning, R. 1952. The Technique of Clear Writing. McGraw-Hill.
[16]
Heilman, M., Collins-Thompson, K., Callan, J., and Eskenazi, M. 2007. Combining lexical and grammatical features to improve readability measures for first and second language texts. In Proc. NAACL, pp. 460--467.
[17]
Hickson-Bilsky, L. 1985. Comprehension and mental retardation. International Review of Research in Mental Retardation, 13: 215--246.
[18]
Katims, D. S. 2000. Literacy instruction for people with mental retardation: Historical highlights and contemporary analysis. Education and Training in Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities, 35(1): 3--15.
[19]
Kincaid, J. P., Fishburne, R. P., Rogers, R. L., and Chissom, B. S. 1975. Derivation of new readability formulas for Navy enlisted personnel, Research Branch Report 8--75, Millington, TN.
[20]
Kincaid, J., Fishburne, R., Rodgers, R., and Chisson, B. 1975. Derivation of new readability formulas for navy enlisted personnel. Technical report, Research Branch Report 8--75, U.S. Naval Air Station.
[21]
McLaughlin, G. H. 1969. SMOG grading - a new readability formula. Journal of Reading, 12(8):639--646.
[22]
McNamara, D. S., Ozuru, Y., Graesser, A. C.,&Louwerse, M. (2006) Validating Coh-Metrix., In Proc. Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, pp. 573.
[23]
Miller, G., and Chomsky, N. 1963. Handbook of Mathematical Psychology, chapter Finatary models of language users, pp. 419--491. Wiley.
[24]
Perfetti, C., and Lesgold, A. 1977. Cognitive Processes in Comprehension, chapter Discourse Comprehension and sources of individual differences. Erlbaum.
[25]
Petersen, S. E., Ostendorf, M. 2009. A machine learning approach to reading level assessment. Computer Speech and Language, 23: 89--106.
[26]
R Development Core Team. 2008. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. http://www.R-project.org
[27]
Roark, B., Mitchell, M., and Hollingshead, K. 2007. Syntactic complexity measures for detecting mild cognitive impairment. In Proc. ACL Workshop on Biological, Translational, and Clinical Language Processing (BioNLP'07), pp. 1--8.
[28]
Schwarm, S., and Ostendorf, M. 2005. Reading level assessment using support vector machines and statistical language models. In Proc. ACL, pp. 523--530.
[29]
Si, L., and Callan, J. 2001. A statistical model for scientific readability. In Proc. CIKM, pp. 574--576.
[30]
Stenner, A. J. 1996. Measuring reading comprehension with the Lexile framework. 4th North American Conference on Adolescent/Adult Literacy.
[31]
U.S. Census Bureau. 2000. Projections of the total resident population by five-year age groups and sex, with special age categories: Middle series 2025--2045. Washington: U.S. Census Bureau, Populations Projections Program, Population Division.
[32]
Weekly Reader, 2008. http://www.weeklyreader.com (Accessed Oct., 2008).
[33]
Western/Pacific Literacy Network / Literacyworks, 2008. CNN SF learning resources. http://literacynet.org/cnnsf/ (Accessed Oct., 2008).
[34]
Williams, S., Reiter, E. 2005. Generating readable texts for readers with low basic skills. In Proc. European Workshop on Natural Language Generation, pp. 140--147.
[35]
Yngve, V. 1960. A model and a hypothesis for language structure. American Philosophical Society, 104:446--466.

Cited By

View all
  • (2016)A new readability measure for web documents and its evaluation on an effective web search engineProceedings of the 18th International Conference on Information Integration and Web-based Applications and Services10.1145/3011141.3011172(355-362)Online publication date: 28-Nov-2016
  • (2015)Making It SimplextACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/27380466:4(1-36)Online publication date: 11-May-2015
  • (2014)What makes a good biography?Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on World wide web10.1145/2566486.2567972(855-866)Online publication date: 7-Apr-2014
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image DL Hosted proceedings
EACL '09: Proceedings of the 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
March 2009
905 pages

Publisher

Association for Computational Linguistics

United States

Publication History

Published: 30 March 2009

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Acceptance Rates

EACL '09 Paper Acceptance Rate 100 of 360 submissions, 28%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 100 of 360 submissions, 28%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)119
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)17
Reflects downloads up to 12 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2016)A new readability measure for web documents and its evaluation on an effective web search engineProceedings of the 18th International Conference on Information Integration and Web-based Applications and Services10.1145/3011141.3011172(355-362)Online publication date: 28-Nov-2016
  • (2015)Making It SimplextACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/27380466:4(1-36)Online publication date: 11-May-2015
  • (2014)What makes a good biography?Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on World wide web10.1145/2566486.2567972(855-866)Online publication date: 7-Apr-2014
  • (2014)Readability Classification of Bangla TextsProceedings of the 15th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing - Volume 840410.1007/978-3-642-54903-8_42(507-518)Online publication date: 6-Apr-2014
  • (2013)What to read next?Proceedings of the 7th ACM conference on Recommender systems10.1145/2507157.2507181(113-120)Online publication date: 12-Oct-2013
  • (2013)Assessing user-specific difficulty of documentsInformation Processing and Management: an International Journal10.1016/j.ipm.2012.04.00149:1(198-212)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2013
  • (2012)Building readability lexicons with unannotated corporaProceedings of the First Workshop on Predicting and Improving Text Readability for target reader populations10.5555/2390916.2390923(33-39)Online publication date: 7-Jun-2012
  • (2012)Automatic metrics for genre-specific text qualityProceedings of the 2012 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Student Research Workshop10.5555/2385736.2385748(54-59)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2012
  • (2012)Is wikipedia too difficult?Proceedings of the 21st ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management10.1145/2396761.2398703(2607-2610)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2012
  • (2012)Large scale analysis of changes in english vocabulary over recent timeProceedings of the 21st ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management10.1145/2396761.2398682(2523-2526)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2012
  • Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Login options

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media