Reuse of Lexicographic Examples in a Web-based Learners’ Dictionary

Content creation for a language learning system is a time-consuming, laborious, and expensive task. It is therefore desirable to reuse content as much as possible in different learning situation. An important part of content is the illustrative content, i.e. example sentences. Such examples show a typical context in which a given rule can be used. We discuss a solution to reuse illustrative content in a Web-based learners’ dictionary for the German and Italian languages. We explore fully the potential of hypertext, which allows building complex networks of small pieces of learning material. Natural language processing techniques are applied to facilitate the reuse of the manually created content. Our approach can be combined with other, more classical initiatives for sharing and reusing learning material. A first evaluation shows promising results.