A recent growth in textual analysis research in the accounting and finance literature relies heavily on context to draw conclusions about the readability or sentiment of the text under study. Yet the complexity of the text used in the financial disclosure is also relevant in evaluating readability and sentiment. Experimental results in this dissertation thesis show that a change in annual report complexity is associated with a change in the probability that a subject will comprehend the information being communicated in the disclosure. Specifically, increasing the complexity of an annual report disclosure dampens the probability that a subject will understand good news disclosures and accentuates the probability that a subject will understand bad news disclosures. Experimental results in this dissertation thesis also demonstrate that a change in annual report complexity is associated with a change in the probability that a subject will be optimistic about the nature of the news being communicated in the disclosure. Specifically, an increase in the complexity of an annual report disclosure reduces the probability that a subject will be optimistic about neutral news disclosures, decreases the probability that a subject will be optimistic about good news disclosures, and increases the probability that a subject will be optimistic about bad news disclosures. Further, experimental results show that subjects utilize the Financial Statements, Management's Discussion and Analysis, and Business Data sections of the annual report more frequently than the Notes to Financial Statements section of the annual report. These results should be of interest to regulators, public corporations, and readers of annual report disclosures.

Thesis--Lund. / Summary in English. Includes bibliographical references (p. 135-140) and index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 31-32).

<p>This essay deals with the issue of readability, the term <em>readability</em> referring to what it is that makes a reader perceive a text as difficult or easy. Some factors are related to the reader but there are also those which depend on the text as such, one such factor being style which is the one that will be focused on in this essay.</p><p>The investigation is based on the analysis and comparison of a complete version and an abridged version of Charlotte Brontë’s <em>Jane Eyre, </em>and the questions to be investigated are whether the author of the abridged version has succeeded in making it less complicated, and<em> </em>if he or she has done so by considering stylistic features said to be affecting readability.</p><p>Further, this essay is divided into four chapters. The first chapter contains the background for the analysis and is divided into 4 parts dealing with the following aspects: the definition of readability, early research on readability, later research on readability, and difficult and easy language. Chapter two describes the limitations made and the method used for the analysis which involves looking at the noun phrase, the verb phrase, and the clause. Chapter three gives a detailed description of the corpus investigated. Moving on to chapter four, this is where the results of the investigation are presented. This is done by dividing it into four different subchapters, each of them dealing with issues related to the different areas described in the method. Each of the subchapters then begins with the presentation of the results for each edition which is then followed by a comparative discussion. The essay ends with a conclusion part where conclusions regarding the four areas presented in the analysis are made along with the answering of research questions.</p>

Context. The requirements analysis phase, as the very beginning of software development process, has been identified as a quite important phase in the software development lifecycle. Software Requirement Specification (SRS) is the output of requirements analysis phase, whose quality factors play an important role in the evaluation work. Readability is a quite important SRS quality factor, but there are few available automated approaches for readability measurement, because of the tight dependency on readers' perceptions. Low readability of SRS documents has a serious impact on the whole process of software development. Therefore, it's extremely urgent to propose effective automated approaches for SRS documents readability measurement. Using traditional readability indexes to analyze readability of SRS documents automatically is a potentially feasible approach. However, the effectiveness of this approach is not systematically evaluated before. Objectives. In this study, firstly, we aim to understand the readability of texts and investigate approaches to score texts readability manually. Then investigate existing automated readability approaches for texts with their working theories. Next, evaluate the effectiveness of measuring the readability of SRS documents by using these automated readability approaches. Finally, rank these automated approaches by their effectiveness. Methods. In order to find out the way how human score the readability of texts manually and investigate existing automated readability approaches for texts, systematic literature review is chosen as the research methodology. Experiment is chosen to explore the effectiveness of automated readability approaches. Results. We find 67 articles after performing systematic literature review. According to systematic literature review, human judging the readability of texts through reading is the most common way of scoring texts readability manually. Additionally, we find four available automated readability assessments tools and seven available automated readability assessments formulas. After executing the experiment, we find the actual value of effectiveness of all selected approaches are not high and Coh-Metrix presents the highest actual value of effectiveness of automated readability approach among the selected approaches. Conclusions. Coh-Metrix is the most effective automated readability approach, but the feasibility in directly applying Coh-Metrix in SRS documents readability assessments cannot be permitted. Since the actual value of evaluated effectiveness is not high enough. In addition, all selected approaches are based on metrics of readability measures, but no semantic factors are blended in readability assessments. Hence studying more on human perception quantifying and adding semantic analysis in SRS documents readability assessment could be two research directions in future.

Context: Code readability is something every software developer tackles every day. In order for efficient maintainability and learning of a program the documentation needs to be of high quality. Objectives: This thesis is attempting to show what the general perspective the software developers have. We investigate which method that is preferred and why. We will also look at readability and what similarities and differences there are among students and IT professionals. Conclusion: We have collected data from several sources. Firstly from a literature review where different papers within the field are presented. Secondly from two separate surveys conducted on students and IT professionals. From our results we found that documentation is something that software developers heavily rely on and that the need for extensive documentation differs with working experience.

Context. Source codes with lower level of readability impose a higher cost to software maintainability. Research also exposed the importance of readability as a vital factor on software maintainability. Therefore, readability has recently investigated by software engineers. Readability involves human’s interactions making the study on readability difficult. In this study, we explore the readability of method chain and non-method chain in Java source codes with the means of an eye tracking device as a newly-introduced approach. Objectives. Objectives of this study are: 1. we investigated if the number of methods in a method chain affects the readability of Java source codes, and 2. we investigated the readability of two programming styles: method chain and non-method chain. Methods. To achieve both objectives of this study, two controlled experiments were conducted inside a laboratory with the means of an eye tracker device. In the first experiment, treatment groups were exposed separately to method chains with different number of methods. In the second experiment, the treatment groups were exposed separately to two different programming styles: method chain and non-method chain. Results. Participants of this study were students with the average age of 24.56 years old. Fixation durations of participants’ reading was measured in millisecond (ms). In the first experiment, the average of fixation durations per method with lower number of methods was 600.93 ms, and with higher number of methods was 411.53 ms. In the second experiment, the average of fixation durations per method for non-method chain style was 357.94 ms, and for method chain style was 411.53 ms. Conclusions. In the first experiment, the analysis of fixation durations indicates that method chains with higher number of methods are slightly more readable. Analysis of t-test (t − value = −0.5121, significance level = 0.05, and two-tailed prob-ability) confirms that the results of the first experiment does not show a significant difference at p &lt; 0.05. The results of the second experiment show that non-method chain style is slightly more readable in comparison with method chain style. Analysis of t-test (t − value = 3.1675, significance level = 0.05, and two-tailed probability) confirms that the results of the second experiment show a significant difference at p &lt; 0.05.

Learning to read is one of the most crucial life tasks that the young child must acquire whilst in primary school. In modern society, much of what one does is dependant on having the ability to read. While a great deal of research has focused on how children learn to read, relatively little attention has been paid to the literary quality of the material the children are exposed to whilst learning to read. In the past few years I have become increasingly concerned with the number of teachers who use material designed for teaching children to read without being aware of the literary quality of the material. While numerous teachers are aware of the issues surrounding the learning to read debate and use up to date materials to teach reading, far too many accept the material supplied by the school without questioning its literary merit and its impact upon the young reader. This piece of research is an attempt to evaluate the literary quality of two reading schemes currently in use in Cape Education Department schools. The chief conclusion of the research is that the schemes examined fall far short of the standards required for them to be considered good literature. Although the research is limited to two reading schemes, it is hoped that a teacher using other schemes could use the framework supplied in this study to examine the literary quality of the material she is using. Furthermore, the final chapter offers suggestions as to how to replace material of poor literary quality with books of a higher literary standard. On the basis of the above findings it is suggested that there is a need for individual teachers, schools, teacher training institutions and the Cape Education Department to examine the literary quality of reading schemes and books that are used in the process of teaching children to read. It is hoped that this piece of research will create a greater awareness amongst teachers of the literary quality of reading materials and prompt further research into such materials that will be of benefit to the central character in this study; the young child learning to read

This study contributes to the mergers and acquisitions as well as the informational transparency literature – by examining the relationship between a firm’s analysts' forecast error/ informational uncertainty and M&A outcomes. Contrary to our conventional wisdom, we find that an acquiring firm with more forecast errors and informational uncertainty (firm risk, as expressed by stock return variation) tends to have more favorable abnormal market reactions. Whereas a target firm with more forecast errors and informational uncertainty tends to have less favorable abnormal market reactions. As the relation between acquirer forecast errors and informational uncertainty looks counter-intuitive, we further delve into this issue. We find that, in general, firms with higher analysts' forecast errors and informational uncertainty tend to make fewer acquisitions, which implies that firms with lower informational quality are more selective in their acquisitions. Further, we find that the positive relationship between forecast error/ informational uncertainty and CAR is primarily driven by non-public target acquisitions. In the sub-sample analyses - where we consider only public target firms, our results show that acquirers with higher forecast errors and uncertainty end up acquiring targets with higher forecast errors and weaker firm performance. These findings offer some plausible explanation for the non-significant relation between acquirer analysts' forecast errors/ informational uncertainty and M&A market reactions. It appears that market participants are less enthusiastic about public target acquisitions by acquirers with more inferior informational quality.

Context Writing and working with regular expressions could be a slow and tedious task,which is mainly because of its syntax, but also because there exist several different dialectswhich easily could cause confusion. Even though regular expression has been widely used forparsing and programming language design, they are now frequently used for input validationand seen in common applications such as text editors. Objectives The main objectives of our thesis are to determine whether or not a regularexpression language that is more like the surrounding programming language would increaseusability, readability, and maintainability. We will then investigate further into what kind ofimpact this would have regarding e.g, development speed, and what benefits and liabilities amore modernized syntax could introduce. Methods Two different methods were used to answer our research questions, exploratory in-terviews, and experiments. The data from the experiments were collected by screen recordingand a program in the environment we provided to the participant. Results.By doing interviews with developers that use traditional regular expressions on aregular basis, their stories confirm that its syntax is confusing even for developers with alot of experience. Our results from the experiment indicate that a language more like thesurrounding language increases both the overall ease of use and development speed. Conclusions From this research, we can conclude that a regular expression language thatis more like the surrounding programming language does increase usability, readability, andmaintainability. We could clearly see that it had a positive effect on the development speed aswell. Keywords — regular expressions, programming language design, readability