Corpus-based vocabulary lists for language learners for nine languages

Abstract

We present the KELLY project and its work on developing monolingual and bilingual word lists for language learning, using corpus methods, for nine languages and thirty-six language pairs. We describe the method and discuss the many challenges encountered. We have loaded the data into an online database to make it accessible for anyone to explore and we present our own first explorations of it. The focus of the paper is thus twofold, covering pedagogical and methodological aspects of the lists' construction, and linguistic aspects of the by-product of the project, the KELLY database.We would like to dedicate this paper to our colleague Frieda Charalabopoulou, who died, following a long struggle with cancer, between its writing and its publication.

Manipulating the Difficulty of C-Tests

“…By reducing complex texts or sentences to simpler ones, more texts are made accessible for less proficient learners. This is done either on a word level by substituting difficult words with easier ones (e.g., Kilgarriff et al, 2014) or on a sentence level (Vajjala and Meurers, 2014). More recent work also explores sequence-to-sequence neural network architectures for this task (Nisioi et al, 2017).…”

Constructing a concept of number

“…Numerical language, in turn, is influenced by the material forms used for counting. Lexical forms for small (subitizable) numbers emerge first across number systems, giving them the greatest potential for irregularity: When small numbers are named, the number system has little material or linguistic structuring; they are the most frequently used number-words (Davies & Gardner, 2013;Kilgarriff et al, 2014;Xiao & McEnery, 2004), subjecting them to memorization effects xiii ; and they have the greatest longevity, increasing their exposure to processes of linguistic change. In comparison, higher numbers emerge through the use of material forms, increasing the likelihood their names will be influenced by material structure (e.g., as decimalization reflects finger-counting).…”

Automatic creation of bilingual dictionaries for Finno-Ugric languages

“…Bilingual dictionaries play a critical role not only in machine translation [3] and crosslanguage information retrieval [4], but also in other NLP applications, like language learning [5], computational semantics and several tasks requiring reliable lexical semantic information [6]. Since manual dictionary building is time-consuming and takes a significant amount of skilled work, it is not affordable in the case of lesser used languages.…”