Abstract
Readability refers to all characteristics of a document that contribute to its ‘ease of understanding or comprehension due to the style of writing’ [1]. The readability of a text is dependent on a number of factors, including but not constrained to; its legibility, syntactic difficulty, semantic difficulty and the organization of the text [2]. As many as 228 variables were found to influence the readability of a text in Gray and Leary’s seminal study [2]. These variables were classified as relating to document content, style, format or, features of organization.
Enterprise Ireland Grant No. SC/2003/0255.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Klare, G.: The Measurement of Readability, Iowa State University Press (1963)
Chall, J.: Readability: An Appraisal of Research and Application. Number 34 in Bureau of Educational Research Monographs, The Bureau of Educational Research Ohio State University (1958)
Entin, E., Klare, G.: Relationships of measures of interest, prior knowledge, and readabilty to comprehension of expository passages. Advances in reading/language research 3, 9–38 (1985)
Schiefele, U.: Topic interest and free recall of expository text. Learning and Individual Differences 8(2), 141–160 (1996)
Borlund, P.: The concept of relevance in ir. JASIST 54(10), 913–925 (2003)
Cool, C., Belkin, N., Frieder, O., Kantor, P.: Characteristics of text affecting relevance judgments. In: Proceedings of the 14th Natioal Online Meeting, pp. 74–84. Learned Information, Inc (1993)
Barry, C.L., Schamber, L.: Users’ criteria for relevance evaluation: a crosssituational comparison. Information Processing Management 34(2-3), 219–236 (1998)
Kintsch, W.: Learning from text. American Psychologist 49, 294–303 (1994)
Flesch, R.: A new readability yardstick. Journal of Applied Psychology 32, 221–233 (1948)
Dale, E., Chall, J.: A formula for predicting readability. Educational Research Bulletin 27, 11–20 (1948)
Gunning, R.: The Technique of Clear Writing, 2nd edn. McGraw-Hill, New York (1968)
Fry, E.: Fry’s readability graph: Clarifications, validity, and extension to level 17. Journal of Reading 21(3), 242–252 (1977)
Wolfe, M., Schreiner, M., Rehder, B., Laham, D., Kinstch, W., Landauer, T.: Learning from text: Matching readers and texts by latent semantic analysis. Discourse Processes 25, 309–336 (1998)
Dufty, D.F., McNamara, D., Louwerse, M., Cai, Z., Graesser, A.C.: Automatic evaluation of aspects of document quality. In: SIGDOC 2004: Proceedings of the 22nd annual international conference on Design of communication, pp. 14–16. ACM Press, New York (2004)
Collins-Thompson, K., Callan, J.: Predicting reading difficulty with statistical language models: Research articles. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 56(13), 1448–1462 (2005)
Quinlan, J.R.: C4.5: programs for machine learning. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc, San Francisco (1993)
Finn, A., Kushmeric, N.: Learning to classify documents according to genre. In: IJCAI 2003 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Style Analysis and Synthesis (2003)
Talburt, J.: The flesch index: An easily programmable readability analysis algorithm. In: SIGDOC 1985: Proceedings of the 4th annual international conference on Systems documentation, pp. 114–122. ACM Press, New York (1985)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Kane, L., Carthy, J., Dunnion, J. (2006). Readability Applied to Information Retrieval. In: Lalmas, M., MacFarlane, A., Rüger, S., Tombros, A., Tsikrika, T., Yavlinsky, A. (eds) Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3936. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11735106_56
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11735106_56
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-33347-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-33348-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)