Readability of Arabic Medicine Information Leaflets: A Machine Learning Approach

Abstract

This paper presents a project that explores the possibility of assessing the readability level of Arabic medicine information leaflets using machine learning techniques. There are a number of popular readability formulas and tools that have been successfully used to assess the readability of health-related information in several languages. However, there is limited work on the readability assessment of health-related information, specifically medicine information leaflets in Arabic. We describe the design of a tool that uses machine learning to assess the readability of medicine information leaflets. We utilize a corpus comprising 1112 medicine information leaflets annotated with three difficulty levels. Based on a study of existing literature, we selected a number of features influencing text difficulty. The tool will help specialized organizations in medicine information leaflets production to produce the leaflets at appropriate level of reading for the majority of leaflets consumers.