Can LLMs Estimate Cognitive Complexity of Reading Comprehension Items?

ArXi:2510.25064v2 Announce Type: replace Estimating the cognitive complexity of reading comprehension (RC) items is crucial for assessing item difficulty before it is administered to learners. Unlike syntactic and semantic features, such as passage length or semantic similarity between options, cognitive features that arise during answer reasoning are not readily extractable using existing NLP tools and have traditionally relied on human annotation.