Coherence and Cohesion for the Assessment of Text Readability

Overview & Synopsis

Text readability depends on a variety of variables. While lexico-semantic and syntactic factors have been widely used in the literature, more high-level discursive and cognitive properties such as cohesion and coherence have received little attention. This paper assesses the efficiency of 41 measures of text cohesion and text coherence as predictors of text readability. We compare results manually obtained on two corpora including texts with different difficulty levels and show that some cohesive features are indeed useful predictors.