Development of a reading material recommendation system based on a knowledge engineering approach

In a language curriculum, the training of reading ability is one of the most important aspects. Previous studies have shown the importance of assigning proper articles to individual students for training their reading ability; nevertheless, previous experience has also shown the challenges of this issue owing to the complexity of personal factors as well as the diverse properties of the candidate articles to be taken into consideration. This study proposes a knowledge engineering approach for developing reading material recommendation systems by eliciting domain knowledge from multiple experts. Experimental results on 29 senior high school students show that the developed system is able to provide expert-like recommendations to the students by taking preferences and knowledge levels of individual students as well as categories and traits of articles into consideration.