ABSTRACT: With the growth of technology and AI applications in Education, vocabulary learning can be enhanced with resources and innovative teaching materials. However, such applications are designed for groups of learners belonging to homogeneous levels (e.g. school-levels for a first language, CEFR levels for a foreign language). But can we really speak of homogeneity in the classroom? How to foster vocabulary learning when it comes to students with different linguistic/cognitive profiles?
In this talk, I will present several existing lexical resources considered as first attempts to identify a variety of profiles for reading and understanding vocabulary in French as a mother tongue (ReSyf) or as a foreign language (FLElex). After illustrating their limitations, and in the context of adaptive learning, which requires the collection and processing of individual data, I will propose a few perspectives for the creation of new resources to promote vocabulary learning.
Billami, M. B., François, T., & Gala, N. (2018). ReSyf: a French lexicon with ranked synonyms. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, 2570-2581.
François, T., Gala, N., Watrin, P., & Fairon, C. (2014). FLELex: a graded lexical resource for French foreign learners. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), Reykjavik, Iceland, 3766-3773.
Gala, N., Tack, A., Drevet, L. J., François, T., & Ziegler, J. C. (2020). Alector: A parallel corpus of simplified French texts with alignments of misreadings by poor and dyslexic readers. In Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), Marseille, France, 1353-1361.
Short Bio
Pr. Núria Gala is full professor in language sciences at Aix Marseille University, interested in language technologies, computational linguistics, and educational applications enhancing reading and vocabulary learning. She is currently the co-leader of the research team “Languages, Education & Learning” at the Laboratoire Parole et Langage (Speech and Language Laboratory, at Aix Marseille Univ.).
For the past fifteen years, she has been working on readability and lexical complexity from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining automatic methods on corpora with more experimental approaches (reading tests in schools, for example). Recent work includes the development of graded lexicons for French such as FLElex (François et al., 2014) and ReSyf (Billami et al., 2018), and graded corpora to enhance reading in children with different profiles (ALECTOR project, Gala et al. 2020).
Her interest in the difficulties that different readers have in grasping vocabulary (reading it, understanding it, mastering it) has led her to fruitful interdisciplinary collaborations with researchers at various universities, including the Catholic University of Louvain (Center for Automatic Language Processing, CENTAL), the University of Lille (SCALab Cognitive Psychology Laboratory) and the Cognitive Psychology Laboratory (LPC) at Aix Marseille University.
The invitation to exchange with researchers at the Språkbanken represents a great opportunity which may lead to future collaborations (i.e. on innovative lexical resources for education).