VAST 2010 Best Paper: "Visual Readability Analysis"

The Konstanz group presented 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, their VisRA tool assists the reader in understanding why this is the case. To reach that goal, the different aspects of readability (such as complex sentence structure, difficult vocabulary etc.) are measured separately.

This requires features that are expressive predictors of readability, and are also semantically understandable. In the design of the presented visual analysis tool, special emphasis was put on providing the user with as much transparency as possible to ensure that the user can purposefully improve the readability of a sentence.

Furthermore, depending on the size of the documents and the availability of information about the physical and logical layout of the documents, different visual representations can be chosen from. The presented case-studies show the wide applicability of the tool, ranging from support in revising all kind of written texts to the analysis of a whole document collection with respect the text property readability.

For this paper and more from the University of Konstanz, click here.