Intelligent Information Management

The overwhelming number of scholarly publications are in English [1]. Researchers from non-english speaking countries tend to spend more time reading papers, preparing for oral presentations, and they often have a harder time understanding the material [2]. Even native speakers sometimes struggle with highly specialized terminology, so domain-specific vocabulary and complex sentence structures form a major barrier into many fields. Current tools (text simplifiers, dictionary pop-ups) are not personalized and do not prepare readers in advance. This creates a barrier to efficient reading and comprehension.

The aim of this thesis is to create a system that helps readers of English academic literature to improve their understanding of the subject matter. First, the system elicits the reader’s reading comprehension level by giving them reading assignments and assessing their comprehension skills. This allows a personalized reading profile to be developed automatically for a particular user. The system automatically recognizes documents, webpages and other text-based content on the web in the context of academic scholarly publications, analyzing words and sentence structures. Based on the user’s personalized reading profile, sentence structures that are determined to be difficult to understand are explained through definition, examples, or optional translations.

The objective of this thesis is to first investigate existing challenges in the context of reading comprehension in academic publications. Afterwards, a review of current state-of-the-art approaches for increasing reading comprehension level should be conducted. Based on the findings, a conceptual method should be developed, and the solution should be demonstrated through a prototype. The concept’s feasibility should be evaluated through user studies with non-native English speakers.

References

[1] V. Ramírez-Castañeda, “Disadvantages in preparing and publishing scientific papers caused by the dominance of the English language in science: The case of Colombian researchers in biological sciences,” PLoS ONE, vol. 15, no. 9, p. e0238372, Sep. 2020, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0238372.

[2] T. Amano et al., “The manifold costs of being a non-native English speaker in science,” PLOS Biology, vol. 21, no. 7, p. e3002184, Jul. 2023, doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3002184.