A Reading Environment for Learners of Chinese as a Foreign Language

We present a mobile app that provides a reading environment for learners of Chinese as a foreign language. The app includes a text database that offers over 500K articles from Chinese Wikipedia. These articles have been word-segmented; each word is linked to its entry in a Chinese-English dictionary, and to automatically-generated review exercises. The app estimates the reading proficiency of the user based on a to-learn list of vocabulary items. It automatically constructs and maintains this list by tracking the users dictionary lookup behavior and performance in review exercises. When a user searches for articles to read, search results are filtered such that the proportion of unknown words does not exceed a user-specified threshold.