Application of language technologies to assist english teaching

Abstract

This work explores the use of standard Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools for the development of teaching support tools.We use these methods for developing an application that allows to automatically create different types of English exercises aimed at students at the beginners level. The web application contains two interfaces, where teachers can generate four types of exercises starting from English texts, and students can solve them. The four types of exercises are: verb form exercises, noun definition exercises, use of English exercises, and lexical relations exercises. Some of the NLP techniques and tools explored during development include: POS-tagging, language models, word embeddings, Levenshtein distance and WordNet. Developing this tool allowed us to test the potential of Natural Language Processing techniques to generate teaching activities. As a way of validating the tool, we tested it with local teachers and found that there is an important demand for these type of tools in our country.