@inproceedings{howcroft-demberg-2017-psycholinguistic,
    title = "Psycholinguistic Models of Sentence Processing Improve Sentence Readability Ranking",
    author = "Howcroft, David M.  and
      Demberg, Vera",
    editor = "Lapata, Mirella  and
      Blunsom, Phil  and
      Koller, Alexander",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the {E}uropean Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers",
    month = apr,
    year = "2017",
    address = "Valencia, Spain",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/E17-1090/",
    pages = "958--968",
    abstract = "While previous research on readability has typically focused on document-level measures, recent work in areas such as natural language generation has pointed out the need of sentence-level readability measures. Much of psycholinguistics has focused for many years on processing measures that provide difficulty estimates on a word-by-word basis. However, these psycholinguistic measures have not yet been tested on sentence readability ranking tasks. In this paper, we use four psycholinguistic measures: idea density, surprisal, integration cost, and embedding depth to test whether these features are predictive of readability levels. We find that psycholinguistic features significantly improve performance by up to 3 percentage points over a standard document-level readability metric baseline."
}