We present a web-based interface that automatically assesses reading difficulty of Chinese texts. The system performs word segmentation, part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing on the input text, and then determines the difficulty levels of the vocabulary items and grammatical constructions in the text. Furthermore, the system highlights the words and phrases that must be simplified or re-written in order to conform to the user-specified target difficulty level. Evaluation results show that the system accurately identifies the vocabulary level of 89.9% of the words, and detects grammar points at 0.79 precision and 0.83 recall.

We present a mobile app that provides a reading environment for learners of Chinese as a foreign language. The app includes a text database that offers over 500K articles from Chinese Wikipedia. These articles have been word-segmented; each word is linked to its entry in a Chinese-English dictionary, and to automatically-generated review exercises. The app estimates the reading proficiency of the user based on a “to-learn” list of vocabulary items. It automatically constructs and maintains this list by tracking the user’s dictionary lookup behavior and performance in review exercises. When a user searches for articles to read, search results are filtered such that the proportion of unknown words does not exceed a user-specified threshold.