The principles of readability are in every style manual. Readability formulas are in every word processor. What is missing is the research and theory on which they stand.

We present a new algorithm to measure domain-specific readability. It iteratively computes the readability of domainspecific resources based on the difficulty of domain-specific concepts and vice versa, in a style reminiscent of other bipartite graph algorithms such as Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search (HITS) and the Stochastic Approach for Link-Structure Analysis (SALSA). While simple, our algorithm outperforms standard heuristic measures and remains competitive among supervised-learning approaches. Moreover, it is less domaindependent and portable across domains as it does not rely on an annotated corpus or expensive expert knowledge that supervised or domain-specific methods require. Categories and Subject Descriptors

Many textbooks written in emerging countries lack clear and adequate coverage of important concepts. We propose a technological solution for algorithmically identifying those sections of a book that are not well written and could benefit from better exposition. We provide a decision model based on the syntactic complexity of writing and the dispersion of key concepts. The model parameters are learned using a tune set which is algorithmically generated using a versioned authoritative web resource as a proxy. We evaluate the proposed methodology over a corpus of Indian textbooks which demonstrates its effectiveness in identifying enrichment candidates.

Previous work has established that specific linguistic markers present in specialised medical documents (clinical guidelines) can be used to support their automatic structuring within a document engineering environment. This technique is commonly used by the French Health Authority (la Haute Autorité deSanté) during elaboration of clinical guidelines to improve the quality of the final document. In this paper, we explore the readability of clinical guidelines. We discuss a structural measure of document readability that exploits the ratio between these linguistic markers (deontic structures) and the remainder of the text. We describe an experiment in which a corpus of 10 French clinical guidelines is scored for structural readability. We correlate these scores with measures of textual cohesion (computed using latent semantic analysis) and the results of a readability survey performed by a panel of domain experts. Our results suggest an association between the density of deontic structures in a clinical guideline and its overall readability. This implies that certain generic readability measures can henceforth be utilised in our document engineering environment.