@inproceedings{benzahra-yvon-2019-measuring,
    title = "Measuring text readability with machine comprehension: a pilot study",
    author = "Benzahra, Marc  and
      Yvon, Fran{\c{c}}ois",
    editor = "Yannakoudakis, Helen  and
      Kochmar, Ekaterina  and
      Leacock, Claudia  and
      Madnani, Nitin  and
      Pil{\'a}n, Ildik{\'o}  and
      Zesch, Torsten",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications",
    month = aug,
    year = "2019",
    address = "Florence, Italy",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/iwcs-25-ingestion/W19-4443/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/W19-4443",
    pages = "412--422",
    abstract = "This article studies the relationship between text readability indice and automatic machine understanding systems. Our hypothesis is that the simpler a text is, the better it should be understood by a machine. We thus expect to a strong correlation between readability levels on the one hand, and performance of automatic reading systems on the other hand. We test this hypothesis with several understanding systems based on language models of varying strengths, measuring this correlation on two corpora of journalistic texts. Our results suggest that this correlation is rather small that existing comprehension systems are far to reproduce the gradual improvement of their performance on texts of decreasing complexity."
}