Beyond text analysis : image-based evaluation of health-related text readability using style features

Many studies have shown that the readability of health documents presented to consumers does not match their reading levels. An accurate assessment of the readability of health-related texts is an important step in providing material that match readers' literacy. Current readability measurements depend heavily on text analysis (NLP), but neglect style (text layout). In this study, we show that style properties are important predictors of documents' readability. In particular, we build an automated computer program that uses documents' style to predict their readability score. The style features are extracted by analyzing only one page of the document as an image. The scores produced by our system were tested against scores given by human experts. Our tool shows stronger correlation to experts' scores than the Flesch-Kincaid readability grading method. We provide an end-user program, VisualGrader, which provides a Graphical User Interface to the scoring model.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Bafuka, Freddy Nole

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• William J. Long.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/53121

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/53121