Psycholinguistic Models of Sentence Processing Improve Sentence Readability Ranking
David M. Howcroft, Vera Demberg · 2017
While previous research on readability has typically focused on document-level measures, recent work in areas such as natural language generation has pointed out the need of sentence-level readability measures.Much of psycholinguistics has focused for many years on processing measures that provide difficulty estimates on a word-by-word basis.However, these psycholinguistic measures have not yet been tested on sentence readability ranking tasks.In this paper, we use four psycholinguistic measures: idea density, surprisal, integration cost, and embedding depth to test whether these features are predictive of readability levels.We find that psycholinguistic features significantly improve performance by up to 3 percentage points over a standard document-level readability metric baseline.