Matching readers' preferences and reading skills with appropriate web texts

Abstract

This paper describes Read-X, a system designed to identify text that is appropriate for the reader given his thematic choices and the reading ability associated with his educational background. To our knowledge, Read-X is the first web-based system that performs real-time searches and returns results classified thematically and by reading level within seconds. To facilitate educators or students searching for reading material at specific reading levels, Read-X extracts the text from the html, pdf, doc, or xml format and makes available a text editor for viewing and editing the extracted text. © 2009 Association for Computational Linguistics.