When is Wall a Pared and when a Muro? -- Extracting Rules Governing Lexical Selection

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to automatically identify and explain fine-grained lexical distinctions between words in different languages, aiding language learners in understanding when to use specific translations.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach for extracting human- and machine-readable descriptions of lexical distinctions, validated through language learning experiments for Spanish and Greek.

Findings

Effective identification of lexical distinctions

Improved language learning outcomes using extracted descriptions

Publicly available code and data for replication

Abstract

Learning fine-grained distinctions between vocabulary items is a key challenge in learning a new language. For example, the noun "wall" has different lexical manifestations in Spanish -- "pared" refers to an indoor wall while "muro" refers to an outside wall. However, this variety of lexical distinction may not be obvious to non-native learners unless the distinction is explained in such a way. In this work, we present a method for automatically identifying fine-grained lexical distinctions, and extracting concise descriptions explaining these distinctions in a human- and machine-readable format. We confirm the quality of these extracted descriptions in a language learning setup for two languages, Spanish and Greek, where we use them to teach non-native speakers when to translate a given ambiguous word into its different possible translations. Code and data are publicly released here (https://github.com/Aditi138/LexSelection)