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Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners

buildmyvocab.in

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Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners

#33

Post by stefanwlb »

projectorlochsa wrote: post #21
cschmidt wrote: post #4

I 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.

There's a very good book for Latin that uses that trick. Goes from zero to extremely complex Latin. Whole book is in Latin, no translations. https://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Latina-Illustrata-Pars-Familia... The only requirement is knowledge of orthographic alphabet and how each sound is produced. Latin, fortunately, has very simple sounds compared to English or Swedish. It took me about 2 years to go through both parts…

Are you aware of something similar for Biblical Greek?

Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners

#34

Post by nandemo »

cschmidt wrote: post #4

I 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.

How about this?

1. Get a frequency list. The most common word's rank is 1, the second is 2, etc. [0]

2. Then use your favorite Spaced Repetition Software (such as anki) to learn the words in that order.

3. Define a sentence's difficulty as the maximum rank over all its words. You could refine it by adding tie-breakers but I think it doesn't matter. Then sort the sentences in order of difficulty.

[0] See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists

Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners

#35

Post by biesnecker »

cschmidt wrote: post #4

I 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.

I built something like this for Mandarin Chinese at a company I worked for in Shanghai, but the company was acquired and sort of put out to pasture, and it never launched. :-(

Essentially, we took already word-segmented dialog (splitting Chinese sentences into individual words is non-trivial, so having it already segmented was super useful), matched it to words that you knew, and suggested the next lesson you should learn by the percentage of vocabulary that would be new or challenging for you. It was pretty awesome, would love to have another shot at it someday.

Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners

#37

Post by nmstoker »

abhas9 wrote: post #10
wodenokoto wrote: post #3

How 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.

Up/down voting seems good.

I wonder if you might get a bit of an head start if you combine the shorter sentence idea with selection based on higher n-gram counts. For instance, if the keyword + words either side match a common n-gram, you could expect that sentence was reasonably representative and boost it in the initial rankings as compared to an n-gram that has a much lower count.

Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners

#38

Post by sridca »

abhas9 wrote: post #14
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #9

Very 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…

Thanks for your awesome feedback. And yes this is just the initial ground work and part of a larger experiment. We are also trying to teach English using Bollywood movies and GIFs[1]. I agree that human editing is very important and as such upvote/downvote button feature is in pipeline next. [1] https://buildmyvocab.com/ddlj.html

Hey cool project. Can this be used to learn French as a English speaker?

Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners

#39

Post by LeifCarrotson »

biesnecker wrote: post #35
cschmidt wrote: post #4

I 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.

I built something like this for Mandarin Chinese at a company I worked for in Shanghai, but the company was acquired and sort of put out to pasture, and it never launched. :-( Essentially, we took already word-segmented dialog (splitting Chinese sentences into individual words is non-trivial, so having it already segmented was super useful), matched it to words that you knew, and suggested the next lesson you should…

I would love to have a chance to try it! A couple hundred hours into learning Chinese, and that sounds useful. Any chance you can release it?

....if not, what would you consider your best competition?

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