Vincent Pouliot


2023

pdf bib
CEFR-based Contextual Lexical Complexity Classifier in English and French
Desislava Aleksandrova | Vincent Pouliot
Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2023)

This paper describes a CEFR-based classifier of single-word and multi-word lexical complexity in context from a second language learner perspective in English and in French, developed as an analytical tool for the pedagogical team of the language learning application Mauril. We provide an overview of the required corpora and the way we transformed it into rich contextual representations that allow the disambiguation and accurate labelling in context of polysemous occurrences of a given lexical item. We report evaluation results for all models, including two multi-lingual lexical classifiers evaluated on novel French datasets created for this experiment. Finally, we share the perspective of Mauril’s pedagogical team on the limitations of such systems.