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

Aditi Chaudhary, Kayo Yin, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Graham Neubig


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 rules explaining these distinctions in a human- and machine-readable format. We confirm the quality of these extracted rules in a language learning setup for two languages, Spanish and Greek, where we use the rules to teach non-native speakers when to translate a given ambiguous word into its different possible translations.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.553
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6911–6929
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.553
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.553
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Aditi Chaudhary, Kayo Yin, Antonios Anastasopoulos, and Graham Neubig. 2021. When is Wall a Pared and when a Muro?: Extracting Rules Governing Lexical Selection. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6911–6929, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
When is Wall a Pared and when a Muro?: Extracting Rules Governing Lexical Selection (Chaudhary et al., EMNLP 2021)
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PDF:
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Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_acl24_videos/2021.emnlp-main.553.mp4
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