Making Readability Indices Readable

Although many approaches have been presented to compute and predict readability of documents in different languages, the information provided by readability systems often fail to show in a clear and understandable way how difficult a document is and which aspects contribute to content readability. We address this issue by presenting a system that, for a given document in Italian, provides not only a list of readability indices inspired by Coh-Metrix, but also a graphical representation of the difficulty of the text compared to the three levels of Italian compulsory education, namely elementary, middle and high-school level. We believe that this kind of representation makes readability assessment more intuitive, especially for educators who may not be familiar with readability predictions via supervised classification. In addition, we present the first available system for readability assessment of Italian inspired by Coh-Metrix.