Understanding written text is a universal problem and even minor improvements would matter. Syntax highlighting for natural language is a possible improvement.

Understanding written text is a universal problem and even minor improvements would matter. Syntax highlighting for natural language is a possible improvement. I have tried variations of this with no success so far: parts-of-speech tagging in color doesn't seem to help, for example. Automatic extraction and highlighting of named entities is probably most promising. More generally, it's about ways to help humans understand electronic text better by providing them hints and interactions that were not possible (or were difficult) with paper. An established example of this is searching within a page. There are different implementation of this, some better than others: search-as-you-type is good, and so is highlighting all results. I haven't yet seen implementations of query expansion like search engines do: correcting spelling mistakes, finding all word forms, finding synonyms. Finding several terms close to one another would also be helpful.