Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
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Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
#2Nicely done. You could add in a mailing list to send users a digest of new or top vocabulary words every week.
Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
#3How do you decide on which sentences to use?
I'm interested in generating example sentences myself, but in a way, that chooses sentences that are simple, easy to understand and support the word, they are supposed to exemplify.
For example "She got a car for her birthday, while she was traveling in Italy eating pizza" does not tell the reader anything about what a car is, or how the word should be used. However "He drives his car to work", is a much better example of what a car is, what is a common associated verb and how it fits in a sentence.
How do you optimise selection for sentence like the latter?
Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
#4I went to an interesting talk once at the Boston Python meetup, where a guy figured out how to order sentences so could learn them in an order where you already knew the "other" words in the sentence. Basically, making a directed graph of vocabulary.
He was doing it to learn Latin, but you could do it for any language.
Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
#5Nicely done. You could add in a mailing list to send users a digest of new or top vocabulary words every week.
Second that - would also be interesting for English speakers learning a language like Chinese, where the average literate speaker can recognize about 5000 of the most frequently used characters.
Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
#6This is pretty cool.
The second word I clicked was "cant"....and about half I saw were typos of "can't", so, there's some bad data in there if you're trying to learn standard english, but it's good data if you want to understand things people actually write.
Anyway, time to go through and add some apostrophes to a few articles. :-)
Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
#7Nicely done. You could add in a mailing list to send users a digest of new or top vocabulary words every week.
There's a subscription link at the bottom of https://buildmyvocab.com/
Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
#8Very nice! Thanks for sharing!
Some words are not found: https://buildmyvocab.in/affinity
(Just a little correction there: does not exist*)
Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
#9Very cool! Although I feel that sometimes you really need a human touch to make it truly comprehended. For instance, I random clicked on "antediluvian":
https://buildmyvocab.in/antediluvian/
Everything here will get you a "good enough" understanding of what the word means, but this is the only one that really comes close to explaining the word's literal meaning, and it's too vague to be of much use:
any of the early patriarchs who lived prior to the Noachian deluge
A non-native speaker isn't going to have any idea what "Noachian" means (a native speaker probably isn't either unless they can explicitly identify "Noah" as the root), and "deluge" is part of the root of the word we're defining, so simply using the word "deluge" without explaining what it means doesn't really help.
In short, this is a good groundwork, but I think it needs a human editor to push the individual definitions from "acceptable" to "correct".
Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
#10How do you decide on which sentences to use? I'm interested in generating example sentences myself, but in a way, that chooses sentences that are simple, easy to understand and support the word, they are supposed to exemplify. For example "She got a car for her birthday, while she was traveling in Italy eating pizza" does not tell the reader anything about what a car is, or how the word should be used. However "He dr…
That's a great question. Optimizing for sentence selection is important for teaching. For now, I have a simple check that filters out sentences which are longer than 160 characters.
Also, I believe that this is one thing which humans can do better. I, therefore, plan to add upvote & downvote buttons to rate the quality of sentences.