Automatic Selection of Suitable Sentences for Language Learning Exercises

Abstract

In our study we investigated second and foreign language (L2) sentence readability, an area little explored so far in the case of several languages, including Swedish. The outcome of our research consists of two methods for sentence selection from native language corpora based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) techniques. The two approaches have been made available online within Larka, an Intelligent CALL (ICALL) platform offering activities for language learners and students of linguistics. Such an automatic selection of suitable sentences can be valuable for L2 teachers during the creation of new teaching materials, for L2 students who look for additional self-study exercises as well as for lexicographers in search of example sentences to illustrate the meaning of a vocabulary item. Members from all these potential user groups evaluated our methods and found the majority of the sentences selected suitable for L2 learning purposes.