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Previous research in automatic readability assessment has looked at a limited class of lexi-cal and syntactic properties of texts. Moreover, these models are usually not targeted towards any particular group of readers. In my own work, by contrast, I have used sophisticated computational tools to build an automatic readability metric that exploits global semantic (discourse level) properties of a text, in addition to well-studied lexical and syntactic features. Our preliminary results (Feng et al., 2009) confirm the value of discourse attributes. My research is targeted towards understanding the particular difficulties faced by readers with intellectual disabilities. 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