Trends, Limitations and Open Challenges in Automatic Readability Assessment Research

Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022)

Abstract

Readability assessment is the task of evaluating the reading difficulty of a given piece of text. This article takes a closer look at contemporary NLP research on developing computational models for readability assessment, identifying the common approaches used for this task, their shortcomings, and some challenges for the future. Where possible, the survey also connects computational research with insights from related work in other disciplines such as education and psychology.