Device-dependent readability for improved text understanding

Abstract

Readability is used to provide users with high quality service in text recommendation or text visualization. With the increasing use of handheld devices, reading device is regarded as an important factor for readability. Therefore, this paper investigates the relationship between readability and reading devices such as a smart phone, a tablet, and paper. We suggest readability factors that are strongly related with the readability of a specific device by showing the correlations between various factors in each device and human-rated readability. Our experimental results show that each device has its own readability characteristics, and thus different weights should be imposed on readability factors according to the device type. In order to prove the usefulness of the results, we apply the device-dependent readability to news article recommendation.