Readability Measures and Automatic Text Simplification: In the Search of a Construct

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Cardon, Rémi, Doğruöz, A. Seza
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Cardon, Rémi
Doğruöz, A. Seza
author_facet Cardon, Rémi
Doğruöz, A. Seza
contents Readability is a key concept in the current era of abundant written information. To help making texts more readable and make information more accessible to everyone, a line of researched aims at making texts accessible for their target audience: automatic text simplification (ATS). Lately, there have been studies on the correlations between automatic evaluation metrics in ATS and human judgment. However, the correlations between those two aspects and commonly available readability measures (such as readability formulas or linguistic features) have not been the focus of as much attention. In this work, we investigate the place of readability measures in ATS by complementing the existing studies on evaluation metrics and human judgment, on English. We first discuss the relationship between ATS and research in readability, then we report a study on correlations between readability measures and human judgment, and between readability measures and ATS evaluation metrics. We identify that in general, readability measures do not correlate well with automatic metrics and human judgment. We argue that as the three different angles from which simplification can be assessed tend to exhibit rather low correlations with one another, there is a need for a clear definition of the construct in ATS.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_09536
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Readability Measures and Automatic Text Simplification: In the Search of a Construct
Cardon, Rémi
Doğruöz, A. Seza
Computation and Language
Readability is a key concept in the current era of abundant written information. To help making texts more readable and make information more accessible to everyone, a line of researched aims at making texts accessible for their target audience: automatic text simplification (ATS). Lately, there have been studies on the correlations between automatic evaluation metrics in ATS and human judgment. However, the correlations between those two aspects and commonly available readability measures (such as readability formulas or linguistic features) have not been the focus of as much attention. In this work, we investigate the place of readability measures in ATS by complementing the existing studies on evaluation metrics and human judgment, on English. We first discuss the relationship between ATS and research in readability, then we report a study on correlations between readability measures and human judgment, and between readability measures and ATS evaluation metrics. We identify that in general, readability measures do not correlate well with automatic metrics and human judgment. We argue that as the three different angles from which simplification can be assessed tend to exhibit rather low correlations with one another, there is a need for a clear definition of the construct in ATS.
title Readability Measures and Automatic Text Simplification: In the Search of a Construct
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09536