Liftoff – ReaderBench introduces new online functionalities

Abstract

International audienceNatural Language Processing (NLP) became a trending domain within recent years for many researches and companies due to its wide applicability and the new advances in technology. The aim of this paper is to introduce an updated version or our open-source NLP framework, ReaderBench (http://readerbench.com/), designed to support both students and tutors in multiple learning scenarios that encompass one or more of the following dimensions: Cohesion Network Analysis of discourse, textual complexity assessment, keywords’ extraction using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and word2vec semantic models, as well as the analysis of online communities and discussions. The latest version of our ReaderBench framework (v4.1) includes: a) new features, Application Programing Interfaces (APIs) and visualizations (e.g., sociograms, analysis of interaction between participants inside a community), b) a new web interface written in Angular 6, and c) the integration of new technologies to increase performance (i.e., spaCy and AKKA), as well as modularity and ease of deployment (i.e., Artifactory and Maven modules). ReaderBench is a fully functional framework capable to enhance the quality of learning processes conducted in multiple languages (English, French, Romanian, Dutch, Spanish, and Italian), and covering both individual and collaborative assessments