Using Wikipedia for language learning

Abstract

Differentiating between words like look, see and watch, injury and wound, or broad and wide presents great challenges to language learners because it is the collocates of these words that reveal their different shades of meaning, rather than their dictionary definitions. This paper describes a system called FlaxCLS that overcomes the restrictions and limitations of the existing tools used for collocation learning. FlaxCLS automatically extracts useful syntactic-based word from three millions Wikipedia article and provides a simple interface through which learners seek collocations of any words, or search for combinations of multiple words. The system also retrieves semantically related words and collocations of the query term by consulting Wikipedia. FlaxCLS has been used as language support for many Masters and PhD students in a New Zealand university. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the interface it provides is easy to use and students have found it helpful in improving their written English.