Abstract
One major reason that readability checkers are still far away from judging the understandability of texts consists in the fact that no semantic information is used. Syntactic, lexical, or morphological information can only give limited access for estimating the cognitive difficulties for a human being to comprehend a text. In this paper however, we present a readability checker which uses semantic information in addition. This information is represented as semantic networks and is derived by a deep syntactico-semantic analysis. We investigate in which situations a semantic readability indicator can lead to superior results in comparison with ordinary surface indicators like sentence length. Finally, we compute the weights of our semantic indicators in the readability function based on the user ratings collected in an online evaluation.
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
Rascu, E.: A controlled language approach to text optimization in technical documentation. In: Proceedings of KONVENS 2006, Konstanz, Germany, pp. 107–114 (2006)
Flesch, R.: A new readability yardstick. Journal of Applied Psychology 32, 221–233 (1948)
Amstad, T.: Wie verständlich sind unsere Zeitungen? PhD thesis, Universität Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland (1978)
Chall, J., Dale, E.: Readability Revisited: The New Dale-Chall Readability Formula. Brookline Books, Brookline, Massachusetts (1995)
McCarthy, P., Lightman, E., Dufty, D., McNamara, D.: Using Coh-Metrix to assess distributions of cohesion and difficulty: An investigation of the structure of high-school textbooks. In: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Vancouver, Canada (2006)
Heilman, M.J., Collins-Thompson, K., Callan, J., Eskenazi, M.: Combining lexical and grammatical features to improve readability measures for first and second language texts. In: Proceedings of the Human Language Technology Conference, Rochester, New York (2007)
Segler, T.M.: Investigating the Selection of Example Sentences for Unknown Target Words in ICALL Reading Texts for L2 German. PhD thesis, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK (2007)
Chandrasekar, R., Srinivas, B.: Automatic induction of rules for text simplification. Technical Report IRCS Report 96-30, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1996)
Helbig, H.: Knowledge Representation and the Semantics of Natural Language. Springer, Berlin (2006)
Hartrumpf, S.: Hybrid Disambiguation in Natural Language Analysis. Der Andere Verlag, Osnabrück (2003)
Hartrumpf, S., Helbig, H., Osswald, R.: The semantically based computer lexicon HaGenLex – Structure and technological environment. Traitement automatique des langues 44(2), 81–105 (2003)
Hartrumpf, S., Helbig, H., Leveling, J., Osswald, R.: An architecture for controlling simple language in web pages. eMinds: International Journal on Human-Computer Interaction 1(2), 93–112 (2006)
Jenge, C., Hartrumpf, S., Helbig, H., Nordbrock, G., Gappa, H.: Description of syntactic-semantic phenomena which can be automatically controlled by NLP techniques if set as criteria by certain guidelines. EU-Deliverable 6.1, FernUniversität in Hagen (2005)
Groeben, N.: Leserpsychologie: Textverständnis – Textverständlichkeit. Aschendorff, Münster (1982)
Drosdowski, G.: Duden - Grammatik der deutschen Gegenwartssprache. Dudenverlag, Mannheim (1995)
Langer, I., von Thun, F.S., Tausch, R.: Sich verständlich ausdrücken. Reinhardt, München (1981)
Helbig, G., Kempter, F.: Das Passiv. Zur Theorie und Praxis des Deutschunterrichts für Ausländer. Langenscheidt, Berlin (1997)
Likert, R.: A technique for the measurement of attitudes. Archives of Psychology 140, 1–55 (1932)
Bertsimas, D., Tsitsiklis, J.: Introduction to Linear Optimization., Athena Scientific, Belmont (1997)
Greene, W.: Econometric Analysis. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs (1993)
vor der Brück, T., Leveling, J.: Parameter learning for a readability checking tool. In: Hinneburg, A. (ed.) Proceedings of the LWA 2007 (Lernen-Wissen-Adaption), Workshop KDML. Gesellschaft für Informatik, Halle/Saale, Germany (2007)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
vor der Brück, T., Hartrumpf, S. (2009). A Readability Checker Based on Deep Semantic Indicators. In: Vetulani, Z., Uszkoreit, H. (eds) Human Language Technology. Challenges of the Information Society. LTC 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5603. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04235-5_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04235-5_20
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-04234-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-04235-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)