Papers with readability metrics
You Don’t Have Time to Read This: An Exploration of Document Reading Time Prediction (2020.acl-main)
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Orion Weller, Jordan Hildebrandt, Ilya Reznik, Christopher Challis, E. Shannon Tass, Quinn Snell, Kevin Seppi
| Challenge: | Existing work on reading time prediction has focused on word level only predictions . however, previous work has focused only on word levels . |
| Approach: | They perform an experiment to examine how different features of text contribute to the time it takes to read, distributing and collecting data from over a thousand participants. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method combines a large number of machine learning methods with textual and stylistic factors to predict the time it takes to read. |
Medical Text Simplification: Optimizing for Readability with Unlikelihood Training and Reranked Beam Search Decoding (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Text simplification has emerged as an increasingly useful application of AI for bridging the communication gap in specialized fields such as medicine, where the lexicon is often dominated by technical jargon and complex constructs. |
| Approach: | They propose a unlikelihood loss that encourages generation of simpler terms and a reranked beam search decoding method that optimizes for simplicity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods achieve better performance on readability metrics on three datasets. |
Text Simplification from Professionally Produced Corpora (L18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to Text Simplification rely on the Wikipedia-Simple Wikipedia parallel corpus, which is used for many tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the Newsela corpus to extract 550, 644 complex-simple sentence pairs from the corpus and introduce a lexical simplifier that uses the corpu to generate candidate simplifications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches and generates candidate simplifications from the newsela corpus. |
Generating Summaries with Controllable Readability Levels (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current text generation approaches focus on a specific readability level, resulting in texts that are not customized to readers’ proficiency levels. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate summaries with fine-grained control over their readability by using instruction-based readability control, reinforcement learning and lookahead to estimate readability of upcoming decoding steps. |
| Outcome: | The generated summaries with different readability levels were compared with previous methods that focus on a specific readability level (e.g., lay summarization) and a lookahead approach significantly improved readability control on news summarizing. |
Evaluating the Evaluators: Are readability metrics good measures of readability? (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Plain language summarization (PLS) aims to distill complex documents into accessible summaries for non-expert audiences. |
| Approach: | They conduct a thorough survey of literature on plain language summarization (PLS) and find that traditional readability metrics are not compared to human judgments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed language models better capture deeper measures of readability, with the best-performing model achieving a Pearson correlation of 0.56 with human judgments. |