READ-IT: assessing readability of Italian texts with a view to text simplification

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new approach to readability assessment with a specific view to the task of text simplification: the intended audience includes people with low literacy skills and/or with mild cognitive impairment. READ-IT represents the first advanced readability assessment tool for what concerns Italian, which combines traditional raw text features with lexical, morpho-syntactic and syntactic information. In READ-IT readability assessment is carried out with respect to both documents and sentences where the latter represents an important novelty of the proposed approach creating the prerequisites for aligning the readability assessment step with the text simplification process. READ-IT shows a high accuracy in the document classification task and promising results in the sentence classification scenario