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Reading skills are essential to acquire technical and scientific knowledge. This is especially relevant in the context of formal education and training contexts, as Adult Learning (AL) and Vocational Educational Training (VET), and in practical and empirical work contexts, such as when companies provide written information or instructions to their workers. People with low literacy skills are less capable to acquire and maintain transversal and durable skills needed to stay apace in a changing job market and to lead meaningful and complete lives. However, promoting and motivating reading habits and skills in adults is quite challenging due to the lack of dedicated and/or adequate reading materials.

Supporting the adoption and diffusion of innovation in adult training, the iRead4Skills project aims to promote the development of reading skills through an innovative intelligent system that evaluates texts complexity and suggests reading materials adequate to the user reading level, which can also be used by trainers in the creation or adaptation of texts with the appropriate level of complexity for their individual students. This means contributing not only to upskilling and reskilling people, to developing their flexibility and adapting abilities, including staying apace with new skills related to technology, but also to new educational strategies related to formal education, responding to individual and social needs, and boosting adults’ motivation and participation. Finally, iRead4Skills will contribute to innovative and inclusive education systems, using digital technologies to provide quality training.

By combining an interdisciplinarity team covering different fields of expertise such as ICT, Linguistics, Economics and Education, and by bringing together governmental entities, tech companies and research institutions, the iRead4Skills project will provide groundbreaking research and innovation, going beyond the current state of the art in several key areas:

Assessing the response to specific needs from the AL communities involved and devising ways to evaluate results to inform proposals for employers and policy makers.

The training difficulties of adult learners can range from basic reading skills to motivational factors. The development of the iRead4Skills system goes beyond existing studies and tools due to its cooperative nature. Based on input from end-users and covering their real needs, the project will provide a new way to assess the response of individuals, skill development institutions, and employers to issues on reading skills and to gather data to inform policy makers on the conditions for the successful development of skills.

Developing new complexity measures and base data sets.

iRead4Skills solution goes beyond existing systems by developing and testing a language-designed system based on the direct input from AL trainers and learners. This means that actual end-users will provide the base classification of texts according to their sensitivity to complexity, and that new complexity levels and features are to be researched from these new and valuable data sets. This also means new complexity measures based not on proficiency levels of a second language, but on issues of complexity for native speakers, which can be drastically different.

Testing and developing Natural Language Processing systems directly with end-users.

iRead4Skills innovates the current paradigm for developing machine-learning systems, devised and tested only on data sets. Current systems produced in academia are not developed nor tested in real case scenarios, where end-users evaluate their usability and utility. In the iRead4Skills project, we will go the extra mile, and test the system directly with specific end-users (i.e., low literacy adults). This will allow us to devise an intelligent tool, attuned to the user, but also to gather solid evidence to assess its impact.

Promoting the use of Art and Culture to develop fundamental and transversal skills.

By including reading materials from a wide range of domains (literature, history/social studies, science, etc.), iRead4Skills provides a foundation of knowledge that will help adult learners to be better readers in all domains. In addition to professional and scientific training, the project will contribute to raise interest in humanistic, scientific, and technological knowledge of adult population, to bring adult readers closer to literature, culture, and general information, and to improve communication and educational practices for all.