Textual complexity as an indicator of document relevance

We study the textual complexity of documents as an aspect of the Information Retrieval process that influences retrieval effectiveness. Our experiments show that in many cases user queries allow determining which linguistic competency level best suits an underlying information need. The paper investigates promising first approaches on how to do so automatically and compares them to an idealistic baseline. By filtering out documents of unexpected textual complexity, we find improved search results mainly when using precision-oriented effectiveness measures