Understanding Italian Administrative Texts: A Reader-Oriented Study for Readability Assessment and Text Simplification

The complexity of administrative texts can preclude citizens with language disparities from accessing relevant information. Recent deep-learning models of readability assessment and text simplification would greatly benefit from training materials that are annotated with the specific needs of the target readers. The aim of the present work is to investigate how differently second language learners of Italian and elderly Italian native speakers read and comprehend administrative texts of different readability levels in digital format, as compared to a control group of Italian native speakers. To this end, we conducted a study where 86 participants from the three groups were asked to perform a comprehension task via smartphone. Participants read administrative texts in their original and simplified form, where simplification was performed on the basis of linguistic features that previous literature considered typical of the administrative domain. Although the applied simplification did not seem to affect text comprehension, we observed differences across the three subject groups, especially in relation to participants’ background.