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The Use of Readability Metrics in Legal Text: A Systematic Literature Review

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arxiv 2411.09497 v1 pith:Q3ZT6MT2 submitted 2024-11-14 cs.CL

classification cs.CL
keywords metricslegalreadabilityweretextsapplieddifferentdocuments
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Understanding the text in legal documents can be challenging due to their complex structure and the inclusion of domain-specific jargon. Laws and regulations are often crafted in such a manner that engagement with them requires formal training, potentially leading to vastly different interpretations of the same texts. Linguistic complexity is an important contributor to the difficulties experienced by readers. Simplifying texts could enhance comprehension across a broader audience, not just among trained professionals. Various metrics have been developed to measure document readability. Therefore, we adopted a systematic review approach to examine the linguistic and readability metrics currently employed for legal and regulatory texts. A total of 3566 initial papers were screened, with 34 relevant studies found and further assessed. Our primary objective was to identify which current metrics were applied for evaluating readability within the legal field. Sixteen different metrics were identified, with the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level being the most frequently used method. The majority of studies (73.5%) were found in the domain of "informed consent forms". From the analysis, it is clear that not all legal domains are well represented in terms of readability metrics and that there is a further need to develop more consensus on which metrics should be applied for legal documents.

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Cited by 2 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Evaluating the Evaluators: Are readability metrics good measures of readability?

    cs.CL 2025-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Classic readability formulas correlate weakly with human readability judgments for plain-language summaries (FKGL r=0.16), the best LLM judge reaches r=0.56, and the two evaluator families rank datasets nearly opposite.

  2. Standard Applicability Judgment and Cross-jurisdictional Reasoning: A RAG-based Framework for Medical Device Compliance

    cs.AI 2025-06 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    A retrieval-augmented system classifies applicability of Chinese and US medical device standards from free-text device descriptions, reporting 73% accuracy and 87% top-5 recall on a 105-item benchmark.

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