Le tecnologie linguistico-computazionali nella misura della leggibilità di testi giuridici

This paper presents an innovative NLP-based methodology for automatically assessing the readability of legal documents, with a view to their simplification. As part of a broader research field investigating the accessibility of the language of the law, we consider the specific domain of the bureaucratic language through an analysis of real texts; the accessibility to this typology of texts is indeed a crucial requisite of the communication between institutions and citizens. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt aimed at showing that state-of-the-art language technologies are nowadays mature not only to enable the automatic readability evaluation of legal texts but also to support their simplification. For these purposes, we adopted READ-IT, the first advanced readability assessment tool for the Italian language.