Paper Info
Title
Influence of Text and Participant Characteristics on Perceived and Actual Text Difficulty
Abstract
Because patients customarily receive medical text that is difficult to understand, we are developing a simplification algorithm to support simpler writing by medical professionals. Our algorithm relies on term familiarity and automatically suggests alternative wordings from different sources. We conducted a user study (N=17) to evaluate its effectiveness on reducing perceived and actual difficulty. Perceived difficulty was measured using sentences and a Likert-scale. Actual difficulty was measured using documents and multiple-choice and Cloze tests. We found a strong significant simplification effect for perceived difficulty (p=.002), but no effect for actual difficulty: only 6.2% improvement on the Cloze test. Evaluating participant characteristics showed that reading more newspapers or magazines correlated with lower multiple-choice (r=-386, p=.016) and Cloze test (r=-.340, p=.025) scores. STOFHLA scores, a health literacy measure, correlated with the Cloze test scores (r=.461, p=.002).
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1109/HICSS.2013.266
HICSS
Keywords
Field
DocType
user interfaces,text analysis
Text simplification,Information retrieval,Computer science,Cognitive psychology,Knowledge management,Atmospheric measurements,Health literacy,Cloze test,Vocabulary
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1060-3425
3
0.42
References 
Authors
4
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Obay Mouradi1262.13
Gondy Leroy252847.72
David Kauchak336325.92
James E. Endicott4362.65