Title :
Visual readability analysis: How to make your writings easier to read
Author :
Oelke, Daniela ; Spretke, David ; Stoffel, Andreas ; Keim, Daniel A.
Author_Institution :
Univ. of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany
Abstract :
We present a tool that is specifically designed to support a writer in revising a draft-version of a document. In addition to showing which paragraphs and sentences are difficult to read and understand, we assist the reader in understanding why this is the case. This requires features that are expressive predictors of readability, and are also semantically understandable. In the first part of the paper, we therefore discuss a semi-automatic feature selection approach that is used to choose appropriate measures from a collection of 141 candidate readability features. In the second part, we present the visual analysis tool VisRA, which allows the user to analyze the feature values across the text and within single sentences. The user can choose different visual representations accounting for differences in the size of the documents and the availability of information about the physical and logical layout of the documents. We put special emphasis on providing as much transparency as possible to ensure that the user can purposefully improve the readability of a sentence. Several case-studies are presented that show the wide range of applicability of our tool.
Keywords :
data visualisation; text analysis; candidate readability feature; document draft version; document logical layout; document physical layout; semiautomatic feature selection approach; sentence readability; visual analysis tool; visual readability analysis; visual representation accounting; Complexity theory; Correlation; Image color analysis; Length measurement; Navigation; Visualization; Vocabulary; I.5.2 [Pattern Recognition]: Design Methodology-Feature evaluation and selection; I.7.5 [Document and Text Processing]: Document Capture-Document Analysis;
Conference_Titel :
Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST), 2010 IEEE Symposium on
Conference_Location :
Salt Lake City, UT
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4244-9488-0
Electronic_ISBN :
978-1-4244-9487-3
DOI :
10.1109/VAST.2010.5652926