A Reading Comprehension Interface for Students with Learning Disorders

Abstract

A strong reading comprehension ability is not only one of the cornerstones of a successful education but also a crucial skill for various aspects of our daily lives, both in the workplace and personal life. Nonetheless, text comprehension is a complex cognitive task that can prove challenging and frustrating for many children with learning disabilities. In this paper, we introduce an Natural Language Processing (NLP)-powered reading comprehension interface to explore the potential of modern NLP techniques in hybrid therapeutic practices, aiming to make the rehabilitation of text comprehension difficulties more accessible, automatic, multi-modal, and truly inclusive for students with special educational needs and disabilities in presence or at a distance. Our contributions are twofold. Firstly, drawing inspiration from psycho-linguistic theories, we have designed, together with speech and language therapists, an NLP-powered reading comprehension interface as a proof of concept for the treatment of reading comprehension. Secondly, we have deployed and evaluated our proof of concept in a general public setting and initiated the evaluation of our preliminary results in a clinical setting.