While previous research on readability has typically focused on document-level mea sures, recent work in areas such as nat ural language generation has pointed out the need of sentence-level readability mea sures. Much of psycholinguistics has fo cused for many years on processing mea sures that provide difficulty estimates on a word-by-word basis. However, these psycholinguistic measures have not yet been tested on sentence readability rank ing 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 percent age points over a standard document-level readability metric baseline.
展开▼
