National Taiwan Normal University researchers have developed a text readability assessment system that rates the reading difficulty of a book and locates books that suit students’ reading levels and interests, and some schools in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Indonesia have already adopted the system.
Educational psychology professor Sung Yao-ting (宋曜廷) said his team combined theories of psychology and linguistics with cognition technology, such as natural language processing and machine learning algorithms, to develop a Chinese-language readability system, which can decode the semantic content of various texts and rate the difficulty of a book.
“If a book is too difficult for children, they might lose interest in reading. On the other hand, if children can read a book without their parents’ help, it might boost their confidence and motivation,” Sung said.
The system has analyzed 5,611 textbook articles on various subjects and incorporates corpus data to establish a knowledge base of each grade for elementary and secondary school. Parents and teachers can use the system to predict if a book is suitable for students of a certain level, Sung said, adding that the system has an 82.07 percent accuracy rate.
An analysis of popular science magazines and children’s books suggests that most publications are too difficult for children, and there is a tendency among publishers to overate children’s reading ability, he said.
“Traditionally, publishers rely on experience to set the age rating for a book, but they do not have a consistent method to analyze the textual structure of a book to predict whether a book might overwhelm the reader. Our system offers a solution,” he said.
The system could also assess the Chinese competence of students in terms of vocabulary, semantic and lexical comprehension, summarizing, inference ability and critical analysis by subjecting them to a computerized test, while results could be compared with their peers to understand each student’s strengths and weaknesses to design a personalized reading list.
The system could also predict what books a student might like and arrange a reading schedule to encourage further reading, Sung said.
More than 10,000 elementary and secondary-school students from Taiwan, Hong Kong, China and Indonesia began using the system in November last year, and teachers were given data to reorient their teaching and textbook selection, he said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching