A reading skill test to diagnose basic language skills is
introduced. The test is designed to measure six component
skills relevant to reading in comparison with those of state-of-
the-art natural language processing technologies. The results
of the first large-scale experiments using the test are reported.
Surprisingly, almost half of Japanese junior high school
students do no better than machines in dependency analysis.
More than half of 7th grade students do no better than making
random choices on questions involving inferences and
definition understanding
