Bilingual Web Page and Site Readability Assessment

• Tak Pang Lau, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
• Irwin King, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Full text:

Track: Posters

Readability assessment is an instrument to measure the difficulty of a piece of text material, and it is widely used in educational field to assist instructors to prepare appropriate materials for students. In this paper, we investigate the applications of readability assessment in Web development, such that users can retrieve information which is appropriate to their levels. We propose a bilingual (English and Chinese) assessment scheme for Web page and Web site readability based on textual features, and conduct a series of experiments with realWeb data to evaluate our scheme. Experimental results show that, apart from just indicating the readability level, the estimated score acts as a good heuristic to figure out pages with low content-values. Furthermore, we can obtain the overall content distribution in a Web site by studying the variation of its readability.

Other items being presented by these speakers

• PageSim: A Novel Link-based Measure of Web Page Similarity (Posters Track)
• A User Profile-based Approach for Personal Information Access: Shaping Your Information Portfolio (Posters Track)