Vocab Learn: A Text Mining System to Assist Vocabulary Learning

Jingwen Wang, Changfeng Yu, Wenjing Yang, Jie Wang

2019

Abstract

We present a text mining system called Vocab Learn to assist users to learn new words with respect to a knowledge base, where a knowledge base is a collection of written materials. Vocab Learn extracts words, excluding stop words, from a knowledge base and recommends new words to a user according to their importance and frequency. To enforce learning and assess how well a word is learned, Vocab Learn generates, for each word recommended, a number of semantically close words using word embeddings (Mikolov et al., 2013a), and a number of words with look-alike spellings/strokes but with different meanings using Minimum Edit Distance (Levenshtein, 1966). Moreover, to help learn how to use a new word, Vocab Learn links each word to its dictionary definitions and provides sample sentences extracted from the knowledge base that includes the word. We carry out experiments to compare word-ranking algorithms of TFIDF (Salton and McGill, 1986), TextRank (Mihalcea and Tarau, 2004), and RAKE (Rose et al., 2010) over the dataset of Inspec abstracts in Computer Science and Information Technology Journals with a set of keywords labeled by human editors. We show that TextRank would be the best choice for ranking words for this dataset. We also show that Vocab Learn generates reasonable words with similar meanings and words with similar spellings but with different meanings.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Wang J., Yu C., Yang W. and Wang J. (2019). Vocab Learn: A Text Mining System to Assist Vocabulary Learning. In Proceedings of the 11th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (IC3K 2019) - Volume 1: KDIR; ISBN 978-989-758-382-7, SciTePress, pages 155-162. DOI: 10.5220/0008319301550162

in Bibtex Style

@conference{kdir19,
author={Jingwen Wang and Changfeng Yu and Wenjing Yang and Jie Wang},
title={Vocab Learn: A Text Mining System to Assist Vocabulary Learning},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 11th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (IC3K 2019) - Volume 1: KDIR},
year={2019},
pages={155-162},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0008319301550162},
isbn={978-989-758-382-7},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 11th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (IC3K 2019) - Volume 1: KDIR
TI - Vocab Learn: A Text Mining System to Assist Vocabulary Learning
SN - 978-989-758-382-7
AU - Wang J.
AU - Yu C.
AU - Yang W.
AU - Wang J.
PY - 2019
SP - 155
EP - 162
DO - 10.5220/0008319301550162
PB - SciTePress