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 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.

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