IVESS: Intelligent Vocabulary and Example Selection for Spanish vocabulary learning

In the research domain of Intelligent Computer-Assisted Vocabulary Learning (ICAVL), Natural Language Processing (NLP)-driven methodologies (e.g. using Part-Of-Speech tagging, lemmatisation, dependency parsing and word sense disambiguation) are applied to corpora in order to facilitate and/or automate the creation of vocabulary learning materials to be used in a CALL environment. By addressing pending research issues in the field of ICAVL, this project will make a substantial contribution to optimising the interplay between linguistic description, foreign language learning and computational linguistics. Concretely, I will conduct fundamental research on improving automatic vocabulary retrieval and selection (at vocabulary item level), and automatic example selection and simplification (at sentence or paragraph level), applied to the particular case of Spanish as a foreign language. Moreover, to strengthen the link between NLP and foreign language learning, I will study which attitudes end users (i.e. teachers and students) show towards working with the output of this research (i.e. automatically generated learning materials from corpora) in a real learning environment.