Trends, Limitations and Open Challenges in Automatic Readability Assessment Research

Readability assessment is the task of evaluating the reading difficulty of a\ngiven piece of text. Although research on computational approaches to\nreadability assessment is now two decades old, there is not much work on\nsynthesizing this research. This article is a brief survey of contemporary\nresearch on developing computational models for readability assessment. We\nidentify the common approaches, discuss their shortcomings, and identify some\nchallenges for the future. Where possible, we also connect computational\nresearch with insights from related work in other disciplines such as education\nand psychology.\n