<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="P03-2037">
  <Title>Automatic Detection of Grammar Elements that Decrease Readability</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> We always prefer readable texts to unreadable texts.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The texts that transmit crucial information, such as instructions of strong medicines, must be completely readable. When texts are unreadable, we should rewrite them to improve readability.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> In English, measuring readability as reading age is well studied (Johnson, 1978). The reading age is the chronological age of a reader who could just understand the text. The value is usually calculated from the sentence length and the number of syllables. From this value, we find whether a text is readable or not for readers of a specific age; however, we do not find which part we should rewrite to improve readability when the text is unreadable.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The goal of our study is to present tools that help rewriting work of improving readability in Japanese.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The first tool is to help detect the sentence fragments (words and phrases) that should be rewritten; in other words, it is a checker of &amp;quot;hard-to-read&amp;quot; words and phrases in a sentence. Such a checker can be realized with two components: the check list and its detector. The check list provides check items and their readability levels. The detector is a program that searches the check items in a sentence. From the detected items and their readability levels, we can identify which part of the sentence is difficult to read.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> We are currently working on three aspects concerned with readability of Japanese: kanji characters, vocabulary, and grammar. In this paper, we reports the readability checker for the grammar aspect.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>