Vocabulary Volume: A New Metric for Assessing Vocabulary Knowledge

Dolça Tellols, Takenobu Tokunaga, Hikaru Yokono

2022

Abstract

This paper presents Vocabulary Volume, a new metric to assess vocabulary knowledge. The existing metrics for vocabulary knowledge assessment rely on word difficulty, which is often defined in terms of the use frequency of words. In addition to word difficulty, our proposed metrics consider the semantic diversity of words. To formalise semantic diversity, every word is transformed into a vector representation in the semantic space by using the word embedding techniques developed in the natural language processing research. The semantic diversity is defined as the volume of a convex hull that covers all points corresponding to the words. The Vocabulary Volume score (VVS) is calculated from both semantic diversity and word difficulty. To prove the validity of our proposed metric, we conducted experiments using data gathered from Japanese language learners and native Japanese speakers. The experiments explored various options for each component in calculating VVS: word embeddings, dimension reduction methods, and word difficulty scale. The metric was evaluated by distinguishing between the learners’ responses with different levels of language proficiency. The experimental results suggested the best configuration of the components and showed that our proposed metric is better than an existing metric that considers only word difficulty.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Tellols D., Tokunaga T. and Yokono H. (2022). Vocabulary Volume: A New Metric for Assessing Vocabulary Knowledge. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 2: CSEDU, ISBN 978-989-758-562-3, pages 56-65. DOI: 10.5220/0011046300003182

in Bibtex Style

@conference{csedu22,
author={Dolça Tellols and Takenobu Tokunaga and Hikaru Yokono},
title={Vocabulary Volume: A New Metric for Assessing Vocabulary Knowledge},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 2: CSEDU,},
year={2022},
pages={56-65},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0011046300003182},
isbn={978-989-758-562-3},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 2: CSEDU,
TI - Vocabulary Volume: A New Metric for Assessing Vocabulary Knowledge
SN - 978-989-758-562-3
AU - Tellols D.
AU - Tokunaga T.
AU - Yokono H.
PY - 2022
SP - 56
EP - 65
DO - 10.5220/0011046300003182