LexComSpaL2: A Lexical Complexity Corpus for Spanish as a Foreign Language

Jasper Degraeuwe, Patrick Goethals


Abstract
We present LexComSpaL2, a novel corpus which can be employed to train personalised word-level difficulty classifiers for learners of Spanish as a foreign/second language (L2). The dataset contains 2,240 in-context target words with the corresponding difficulty judgements of 26 Dutch-speaking students who are learning Spanish as an L2, resulting in a total of 58,240 annotations. The target words are divided over 200 sentences from 4 different domains (economics, health, law, and migration) and have been selected based on their suitability to be included in L2 learning materials. As our annotation scheme, we use a customised version of the 5-point lexical complexity prediction scale (Shardlow et al., 2020), tailored to the vocabulary knowledge continuum (which ranges from no knowledge over receptive mastery to productive mastery; Schmitt, 2019). With LexComSpaL2, we aim to address the lack of relevant data for multi-category difficult prediction at word level for L2 learners of other languages than English.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.912
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
10432–10447
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.912
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jasper Degraeuwe and Patrick Goethals. 2024. LexComSpaL2: A Lexical Complexity Corpus for Spanish as a Foreign Language. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 10432–10447, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
LexComSpaL2: A Lexical Complexity Corpus for Spanish as a Foreign Language (Degraeuwe & Goethals, LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.912.pdf