A Robust Estimation Scheme of Reading Difficulty for Second Language Learners

Reading difficulty is a measurement for estimating the appropriate reading level of a document. Almost all prior studies are designed for first language learners, but not for second language learners. In this study, we propose a robust estimation scheme, including features such as word frequency, official word grade and grammar patterns, to train a linear model to estimate the difficulty of the document for second language learners. The experiment results show that the proposed estimation scheme outperforms other reading difficulty estimations.