Answering Confucius: The Reason Why We Complicate

Ricardo Kawase presenting @ECTEL2013

Learning is a level-progressing process. In any field of study, one must master basic concepts to understand more complex ones. Thus, it is important that during the learning process learners are presented and challenged with knowledge which they are able to comprehend (not a level below, not a level too high). In this work we focus on language learners. By gradually improving (complicating) texts, readers are challenged to learn new vocabulary. To achieve such goals, in this paper we propose and evaluate the ‘complicator’ that translates given sentences to a chosen level of higher degree of difficulty. The ‘complicator’ is based on natural language processing and information retrieval approaches that perform lexical replacements. 30 native English speakers participated in a user study evaluating our methods on an expert-tailored dataset of children books. Results show that our tool can be of great utility for language learners who are willing to improve their vocabulary.

Authors: Bernardo Pereira Nunes, Stella Pedrosa, Ricardo Kawase, Mohammad Alrifai, Ivana Marenzi, Stefan Dietze and Marco Antonio Casanova

PDF: nunes-ectel2013

As Simple as It Gets – A Sentence Simplifier for Different Learning Levels and Contexts

This paper presents a text simplification method that transforms complex sentences into simplified forms. Our method uses NLP-techniques to simplify the text based on the target audience context, improving its overall understandability. We evaluate our approach in two aspects: grammatical structure and understandability. In both aspects, our approach achieved good results, showing its applicability to the learning process.

Authors: Bernardo Pereira Nunes, Ricardo Kawase, Patrick Siehndel, Marco A. Casanova and Stefan Dietze

PDF: nunes-icalt2013