wordgap automatic generation of gap-filling vocabulary ...automatic generation of gap-filling...
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WordGap �
Automatic Generation of Gap-Filling
Vocabulary Exercises for Mobile Learning
Susanne KnoopSabrina Wilske
University of Bremen, GermanyDigital Media in Education (Prof. Heidi Schelhowe)
May 22, 2013
Susanne Knoop (University of Bremen) WordGap May 22, 2013 1 / 22
Overview
1 Motivation
2 Previous Work
3 WordGap
4 NLP Tools
5 Outlook
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Obstacles To Language Learning
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The Solution
1 Free CALL software
2 Mobile apps (�learn everywhere, everytime�)
3 Exercises from texts that are of special interest to the user
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Vocabulary Learning With Multiple-Choice Cloze Exercises
� Cloze exercises consist of:
1 A sentence2 A target word that has been replaced by a gap3 (normally three) distractors to distract from the target response
� They are widely used in second language training and testing
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The Challenge
� It normally requires expert knowledge to create cloze exercises:
1 Distractors of multiple-choice cloze exercises should not be totallyunlikely but also not too similar to the target word
2 Distractors should have the same grammatical form as the target word
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Previous Work
� Coniam (1997), Brown et al. (2005): Distractors of the same part ofspeech and similar frequency as the target word
� Sumita et al. (2005): Distractors are false synonyms of the targetword (veri�ed by a Google search)
� Evaluation: Performance of students in the automatically generatedtests correlates strongly with standard vocabulary tests.
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WordGap
� server component and mobile app for Android smartphones
� informal vocabulary learning, adapted to the learner's interest
� multiple-choize cloze exercises from a text �le or webpage
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Share a webpage from the browser
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Send the webpage to WordGap
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Choose a part of speech
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Display the exercise sentence by sentence. . .
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. . . receive immediate feedback. . .
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. . . receive immediate feedback. . .
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. . . get the result.
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The server-client model of WordGap
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The NLP pipeline of the WordGap server
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[plain]
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WordNet
� Hierarchic semantic network of the English language (Miller andFellbaum, 2007)
� WordGap: �nd false synonyms or antonyms of a target word asdistractors
� False synonyms: synonyms of synonyms or words with the samehypernym
� Distractors from the text's context often more suitable than thosefrom WordNet
Susanne Knoop (University of Bremen) WordGap May 22, 2013 19 / 22
Natural Language Tool Kit
� extensive open-source Python library for NLP
� WordGap: sentence and word tokenizing and part of speech tagging
� Naive Bayes Tagger with a cut-o� probability of 0.95
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NodeBox Linguistics
� collection of open-source Python libraries for NLP
� WordGap: generate di�erent grammatical forms to adapt distractorsto the target word
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Outlook
� Include grammatical exercises, e.g. di�erent verb tenses
� Extend to other target languages
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