NLP-Based Readability Assessment of Health-Related Texts: a Case Study on Italian Informed Consent Forms

The paper illustrates the results of a case study aimed at investigating and enhancing the accessibility of Italian health-related documents by relying on advanced NLP techniques, with particular attention to informed consent forms. Results achieved show that the features automatically extracted from the linguistically annotated text and ranging across different levels of linguistic description have a high discriminative power in order to guarantee a reliable readability assessment.