Given a document in English, how can you estimate the ease with which someone will find they can read it? Does it require a college-level of reading comprehension or is it something a much younger student could read and understand? While these questions are useful to ask, they don't admit a simple answer. One option is to use one of the (essentially identical) two Flesch Kincaid Readability Tests. These are simple calculations which provide you with a rough estimate of the reading ease. In this episode, Kyle shares his thoughts on this tool and when it could be appropriate to use as part of your feature engineering pipeline towards a machine learning objective. For empirical validation of these metrics, the plot below compares English language Wikipedia pages with "Simple English" Wikipedia pages. The analysis Kyle describes in this episode yields the intuitively pleasing histogram below. It summarizes the distribution of Flesch reading ease scores for 1000 pages examined from both Wikipedias.
No persons identified in this episode.
This episode hasn't been transcribed yet
Help us prioritize this episode for transcription by upvoting it.
Popular episodes get transcribed faster
Other recent transcribed episodes
Transcribed and ready to explore now
SpaceX Said to Pursue 2026 IPO
10 Dec 2025
Bloomberg Tech
Don’t Call It a Comeback
10 Dec 2025
Motley Fool Money
Japan Claims AGI, Pentagon Adopts Gemini, and MIT Designs New Medicines
10 Dec 2025
The Daily AI Show
Eric Larsen on the emergence and potential of AI in healthcare
10 Dec 2025
McKinsey on Healthcare
What it will take for AI to scale (energy, compute, talent)
10 Dec 2025
Azeem Azhar's Exponential View
Reducing Burnout and Boosting Revenue in ASCs
10 Dec 2025
Becker’s Healthcare -- Spine and Orthopedic Podcast