Lexical Chain

A sequence of semantically related words running through a text — for example, "doctor", "hospital", "nurse", "patient" — connected by relations like synonymy, hypernymy, or hyponymy. Lexical chains capture the topical coherence of a document and are used in readability assessment, text summarisation, and simplification. For accessibility, denser and longer lexical chains indicate topic continuity that aids comprehension; fragmented chains signal topic shifts that can overload readers with cognitive disabilities.