Trends, Limitations and Open Challenges in Automatic Readability Assessment Research
It synthesizes two decades of research on readability assessment, highlighting limitations and open problems for researchers in this domain.
This article surveys computational models for readability assessment, identifying common approaches, discussing their shortcomings, and outlining future challenges, while connecting to insights from education and psychology.
Readability assessment is the task of evaluating the reading difficulty of a given piece of text. Although research on computational approaches to readability assessment is now two decades old, there is not much work on synthesizing this research. This article is a brief survey of contemporary research on developing computational models for readability assessment. We identify the common approaches, discuss their shortcomings, and identify some challenges for the future. Where possible, we also connect computational research with insights from related work in other disciplines such as education and psychology.