Towards Non-Latin Text and Layout Personalization for Enhanced Readability

Abstract: Reading has always been an integral part of both professional and personal life. Character and layout recognition and understanding by computers are well-explored areas. Nevertheless, how characters and layout are read and perceived by humans remains relatively underexplored. This work contributes to the field of human-document interaction (HDI) by investigating the effects of character and layout personalization on readability. The paper presents an empirical study on how parts-of-speech (POS)-based character and layout modifications can lead to overall improvements in both reading comprehension and memorization for two non-segmented, non-Latin writing systems: Khmer and Japanese. The experimental results from 43 participants suggest that, by bolding POS-derived content words, Khmer readers perform better on both reading comprehension and memorisation tasks, with a significant effect (p-values of 0.03 and 0.04, respectively). A similar overall tendency is also observed in a pilot study among Japanese readers (10 participants) using syntactic color-coding. In addition, the analyses of reading time, answering time, and perceived difficulty reveal that the proposed text styling technique does not increase any perceived difficulty, cognitive load, or reading effort for the Khmer readers. However, the Japanese readers experienced a decrease in reading speed. This study and its findings represent a significant step towards enabling dynamic, script-dependent personalization of character and layout to optimize human readability.