Automatic Crossword Clues Extraction for Language Learning

Santiago Berruti, Arturo Collazo, Diego Sellanes, Aiala Rosá, Luis Chiruzzo


Abstract
Crosswords are a powerful tool that could be used in educational contexts, but they are not that easy to build. In this work, we present experiments on automatically extracting clues from simple texts that could be used to create crosswords, with the aim of using them in the context of teaching English at the beginner level. We present a series of heuristic patterns based on NLP tools for extracting clues, and use them to create a set of 2209 clues from a collection of 400 simple texts. Human annotators labeled the clues, and this dataset is used to evaluate the performance of our heuristics, and also to create a classifier that predicts if an extracted clue is correct. Our best classifier achieves an accuracy of 84%.
Anthology ID:
2024.bea-1.31
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2024)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Ekaterina Kochmar, Marie Bexte, Jill Burstein, Andrea Horbach, Ronja Laarmann-Quante, Anaïs Tack, Victoria Yaneva, Zheng Yuan
Venue:
BEA
SIG:
SIGEDU
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
381–390
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.bea-1.31
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Santiago Berruti, Arturo Collazo, Diego Sellanes, Aiala Rosá, and Luis Chiruzzo. 2024. Automatic Crossword Clues Extraction for Language Learning. In Proceedings of the 19th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2024), pages 381–390, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Automatic Crossword Clues Extraction for Language Learning (Berruti et al., BEA 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.bea-1.31.pdf