Sorting texts by readability

Abstract

This article presents a novel approach for readability assessment through sorting. A comparator that judges the relative readability between two texts is generated through machine learning, and a given set of texts is sorted by this comparator. Our proposal is advantageous because it solves the problem of a lack of training data, because the construction of the comparator only requires training data annotated with two reading levels. The proposed method is compared with regression methods and a state-of-the art classification method. Moreover, we present our application, called Terrace, which retrieves texts with readability similar to that of a given input text. © 2010 Association for Computational Linguistics.