Assessing Text Readability Using Hierarchical Lexical Relations Retrieved from WordNet

Although some traditional readability formulas have shown high predictive validity in the r=0.8 range and above (Chall & Dale, 1995), they are generally not based on genuine linguistic processing factors, but on statistical correlations (Crossley et al., 2008). Improvement of readability assessment should focus on finding variables that truly represent the comprehensibility of text as well as the indices that accurately measure the correlations....