Detecting Context Dependence in Exercise Item Candidates Selected from Corpora

TL;DR

This paper investigates factors affecting sentence dependence on context to automatically identify suitable sentences for language exercises, aiming to improve selection efficiency and authenticity.

Contribution

It introduces a set of criteria for detecting context dependence and implements a rule-based algorithm with promising precision for selecting independent sentences.

Findings

Rule-based algorithm achieved 0.76 average precision.

80% agreement with human raters on context independence.

Identified relevant aspects influencing context dependence.

Abstract

We explore the factors influencing the dependence of single sentences on their larger textual context in order to automatically identify candidate sentences for language learning exercises from corpora which are presentable in isolation. An in-depth investigation of this question has not been previously carried out. Understanding this aspect can contribute to a more efficient selection of candidate sentences which, besides reducing the time required for item writing, can also ensure a higher degree of variability and authenticity. We present a set of relevant aspects collected based on the qualitative analysis of a smaller set of context-dependent corpus example sentences. Furthermore, we implemented a rule-based algorithm using these criteria which achieved an average precision of 0.76 for the identification of different issues related to context dependence. The method has also been evaluated empirically where 80% of the sentences in which our system did not detect context-dependent elements were also considered context-independent by human raters.