The effect of document readability on perceived familiarity and relevance
Gheorghe Mureşan, Lu Liu, Michael Cole, Catherine L. Smith, Nicholas J. Belkin · Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology · 2005
Abstract We report on an evaluation of the relationship between document readability, an objective measure related to the length and complexity of words and sentences, and the subjective perception of document relevance of users with a certain level of familiarity to a topic. The research reported here, follow‐up work to our TREC effort, tries to explain why all our TREC hypotheses were rejected. While trying to understand what was wrong with our intuition, we propose and test new hypotheses. The main conclusion is that readability may improve the chances that a document is judged relevant, which suggests the use of “blind readability feedback”, i.e. boosting the ranking of relevant documents when performing a search in order to improve retrieval performance.