Beyond text analysis : image-based evaluation of health-related text readability using style features
Name
503453538-MIT.pdf
Description
Full printable version
Size
22.74 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
aefb0a9b23723b491ff5c4380a8c9102
Author(s)
Bafuka, Freddy Nole
Advisor(s)
William J. Long.
Alternative Title
Image-based evaluation of health-related text readability using style features
Image-based evaluation of readability of health-related documents
Date Issued
2009
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Many studies have shown that the readability of health documents presented to consumers does not match their reading levels. An accurate assessment of the readability of health-related texts is an important step in providing material that match readers' literacy. Current readability measurements depend heavily on text analysis (NLP), but neglect style (text layout). In this study, we show that style properties are important predictors of documents' readability. In particular, we build an automated computer program that uses documents' style to predict their readability score. The style features are extracted by analyzing only one page of the document as an image. The scores produced by our system were tested against scores given by human experts. Our tool shows stronger correlation to experts' scores than the Flesch-Kincaid readability grading method. We provide an end-user program, VisualGrader, which provides a Graphical User Interface to the scoring model.
Description
Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2009.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 70-71).
Subjects
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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