Tag: Paper

Keran Mu (UAB team) Publishes Study on Language Transparency in Vocabulary Learning

Written by iread4skills on December 22, 2025. Posted in News.

We are proud to announce that Keran Mu, a doctoral researcher and member of the iRead4Skills project team, has recently published a significant academic article in the journal Langue(s) & Parole. Her research directly draws from and contributes to the work we are doing within the iRead4Skills initiative, highlighting the practical applications of our corpus in understanding cross-linguistic learning.

In her article titled “L’effet facilitateur de la transparence interlinguistique sur l’acquisition lexicale du français et de l’espagnol chez les apprenants sinophones” (The facilitating effect of interlinguistic transparency on lexical acquisition of French and Spanish among Sinophone learners), Keran investigates how knowledge of English and one Romance language can aid in learning another Romance language.

A central component of her methodology involved using the iRead4Skills Spanish corpus, a collection of authentic, leveled texts developed by our project, as a comparative benchmark against textbooks designed for Chinese learners.

Keran’s work exemplifies how iRead4Skills resources are being used in linguistic research. Her analysis compared:

Spanish vocabulary from textbooks for Chinese learners.
French vocabulary from similar textbooks.
The iRead4Skills naturalistic Spanish corpus, designed for native speakers.

This unique comparison allowed her to uncover how “lexical transparency”, the recognizable similarity of words across languages, functions differently for learners versus native speakers, providing valuable insights for language pedagogy and materials development.

Full article: https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/languesparole.150

iRead4Skills featured in Entreprises Magazine

Written by iread4skills on October 1, 2025. Posted in News.

We are delighted to share that the iRead4Skills project has been featured in Entreprises Magazine, a Luxembourgish magazine, in an article dedicated to the importance of promoting adult literacy and reading comprehension across Europe.

Authored by Franz Clément and Laëtitia Hauret (LISER), the piece highlights the project’s mission and the relevance of our work in empowering individuals, strengthening key skills, and fostering social and professional inclusion through literacy innovation.

This recognition reflects the growing impact of iRead4Skills and reinforces our team’s commitment to developing resources and strategies that make a difference in the lives of adults in diverse contexts.

Read the full article (FR): https://www.entreprisesmagazine.com/fr/articles/le-projet-iread4skills-une-aide-pour-integrer-le-marche-du-travail

iRead4Skills Heads to EMNLP 2025 with Intelligent Complexity Analyzer

Written by iread4skills on September 23, 2025. Posted in News.

The iRead4Skills project has reached an important milestone: its latest paper has been accepted for presentation at EMNLP 2025 System Demonstrations, one of the leading international conferences in natural language processing. In November, team members Mario Izquierdo Álvarez and Wafa AISSA will travel to Suzhou, China, to showcase the work.

The accepted paper introduces the iRead4Skills Intelligent Complexity Analyzer, an open-access platform developed to support educators and content creators working with low-literacy adults. The tool assesses the complexity of written texts and provides diagnostic feedback to guide the adaptation of learning materials.

Key features of the system include:

Multilingual support in Portuguese, Spanish, and French.
Automatic classification of texts into four difficulty levels using state-of-the-art NLP models.
Diagnostic evaluation of texts across four dimensions: textual structure, lexicon, syntax, and semantics.

By offering feedback at multiple levels of granularity, the platform helps teachers and developers better tailor materials to learners’ needs.

The development of the Intelligent Complexity Analyzer is the result of extensive teamwork across the iRead4Skills consortium. Alongside the presenting authors, the paper’s co-authors include Raquel Amaro, David Antunes, Thibault Bañeras-Roux, Jorge Baptista, Alejandro Catalá, Luís Correia, Thomas François, Marcos Garcia González, Nuno Mamede, Vasco Nuno Martins, Miguel Neves, Eugénio Ribeiro, Sandra Rodríguez Rey, and Elodie Vanzeveren.

The upcoming presentation at EMNLP provides an opportunity not only to showcase the iRead4Skills tool but also to engage with the global NLP community, exchange insights, and gather feedback to continue advancing the project’s mission: fostering innovation in adult literacy.

INESC-ID Team of iRead4Skills Earns Best Paper Award at PROPOR 2024

Written by iread4skills on May 13, 2024. Posted in News.

We are delighted to announce that our INESC-ID team members of iRead4Skills, Eugénio Ribeiro, Nuno Mamede, and Jorge Baptista, have been honored with the Best Paper Award at the 16th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2024). This prestigious event occurred in Santiago de Compostela, Galiza, on March 12th, 2024, and is renowned as the leading conference focused on Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing for the Portuguese language.

The award-winning paper, “Automatic Text Readability Assessment in European Portuguese,” by Eugénio Ribeiro, Nuno Mamede, and Jorge Baptista is accessible in full here.

This recognition underscores the dedication and expertise of our INESC-ID team and their contribution to the field of linguistic technology. We are immensely proud of Eugénio Ribeiro, Nuno Mamede, and Jorge Baptista for their hard work and this well-deserved accolade at one of the most significant gatherings for researchers in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing.

Congratulations to the entire team on this outstanding accomplishment!