  Readability assessment is the task of evaluating the reading difficulty of a
given piece of text. Although research on computational approaches to
readability assessment is now two decades old, there is not much work on
synthesizing this research. This article is a brief survey of contemporary
research on developing computational models for readability assessment. We
identify the common approaches, discuss their shortcomings, and identify some
challenges for the future. Where possible, we also connect computational
research with insights from related work in other disciplines such as education
and psychology.
