Readability Applied to Information Retrieval

摘要

Readability refers to all characteristics of a document that contribute to its 'ease of understanding or comprehension due to the style of writing'. The readability of a text is dependent on a number of factors, including but not constrained to; its legibility, syntactic difficulty, semantic difficulty and the organization of the text. As many as 228 variables were found to influence the readability of a text in Gray and Leary's seminal study. These variables were classified as relating to document content, style, format or, features of organization.