Automatic Japanese Example Extraction for Flashcard-based Foreign Language Learning

Abstract

Flashcard systems are effective tools for learning words but have their limitations in teaching word usage. To overcome this problem, we suggest that a flashcard system shows a new example sentence on each repetition. This extension requires high-quality example sentences, automatically extracted from a huge corpus. To do this, we use a Determinantal Point Process which scales well to large data and allows us to naturally represent sentence similarity and quality as features. Our human evaluation experiment on the Japanese language indicates that the proposed method successfully extracted high-quality example sentences.