iRead4Skills Presented at IDEM Project Meeting in Barcelona
iRead4Skills took center stage at the latest meeting of IDEM in Barcelona, where researchers and partners gathered to exchange knowledge on how to foster inclusion and innovation in education across Europe.
The presentation, delivered by Thomas François, team leader of the UCLouvain team, drew attention to a pressing issue: according to the OECD, one in five adults in member countries struggles with reading. Poor literacy levels make it harder for people to acquire technical and scientific knowledge, gain new professional skills, and fully participate in society.
To tackle this challenge, iRead4Skills is building an intelligent, open access system that can assess the complexity of texts, recommend suitable reading materials, and support teachers and trainers in adapting content to learners’ needs. The project also integrates advanced annotation tools that highlight difficult words, phrases, and sentence structures, helping learners gradually strengthen their reading abilities.
The project has already delivered significant results, including:
- A multilingual corpus of more than 2,200 texts per language, with 461 annotated for research and training purposes.
- A readability formula specifically tailored to the needs of adults with low literacy skills.
- An annotation system tested with cutting-edge machine learning and large language models.
- A user-friendly interface that brings all these tools together for learners and educators.
By presenting at IDEM, iRead4Skills not only showcased its innovations but also underlined the importance of collaboration between European projects in addressing skills gaps and promoting inclusion.
