The Cambridge English Readability Dataset is composed of reading passages from the five main suite Cambridge English Exams  (known at the time as KET, PET, FCE, CAE, CPE), previous versions of the current Cambridge English Qualifications. These five exams are targeted at learners at A2–C2 levels of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). The documents are harvested from all the tasks in the past reading papers for each of the exams. The Cambridge English Exams are designed for L2 learners specifically and the A2–C2 levels assigned to each reading paper can be treated as the level of reading difficulty of the documents for the L2 learners. 

Publication date: December 2016 

Data security

Please be aware of the problems of leaking benchmark datasets to LLMs (e.g. Balloccu et al, EACL 2024). Please only use this dataset with LLMs hosted locally (e.g. after download from Hugging Face Transformers) or with no retention of data for training if using LLMs via commercial APIs (check that the model cards do not oblige the user to share data or improvements).

Do not provide the corpus (full or partial) to others in any way, even if they have also signed the licence agreement, e.g. through the use of repositories on sites such as Hugging Face and GitHub.

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Authors and Contributors 

From Cambridge University: Menglin Xia, Ekaterina Kochmar, Ted Briscoe

Citing this paper 

Please reference the following paper if you are using this dataset: 

@inproceedings{xia2014, 
author = {Xia, Menglin  and Kochmar, Ekaterina  and Briscoe, Ted}, 
title = {Text Readability Assessment for Second Language Learners}, 
year = {2016} 
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Innovative Use of {NLP} for Building Educational Applications}, 
}  

The paper is available at: https://aclanthology.org/W16-0502/ 

You may publish the results of research using this dataset.  In any such publication you must acknowledge use of the dataset in your research by citing Cambridge University Press & Assessment and the Authors and Contributors as shown.  

We ask you to inform us of any such publications by emailing: researchdatasets@cambridge.org 

Please report any issues or problems in downloading the dataset by emailing: researchdatasets@cambridge.org 

Licence Agreement 

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