CEFR-based Contextual Lexical Complexity Classifier in English and French

Desislava Aleksandrova, Vincent Pouliot


Abstract
This paper describes a CEFR-based classifier of single-word and multi-word lexical complexity in context from a second language learner perspective in English and in French, developed as an analytical tool for the pedagogical team of the language learning application Mauril. We provide an overview of the required corpora and the way we transformed it into rich contextual representations that allow the disambiguation and accurate labelling in context of polysemous occurrences of a given lexical item. We report evaluation results for all models, including two multi-lingual lexical classifiers evaluated on novel French datasets created for this experiment. Finally, we share the perspective of Mauril’s pedagogical team on the limitations of such systems.
Anthology ID:
2023.bea-1.43
Volume:
Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2023)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Ekaterina Kochmar, Jill Burstein, Andrea Horbach, Ronja Laarmann-Quante, Nitin Madnani, Anaïs Tack, Victoria Yaneva, Zheng Yuan, Torsten Zesch
Venue:
BEA
SIG:
SIGEDU
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
518–527
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.bea-1.43
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.bea-1.43
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Desislava Aleksandrova and Vincent Pouliot. 2023. CEFR-based Contextual Lexical Complexity Classifier in English and French. In Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2023), pages 518–527, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CEFR-based Contextual Lexical Complexity Classifier in English and French (Aleksandrova & Pouliot, BEA 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.bea-1.43.pdf