Answering Confucius: The Reason Why We Complicate

Learning is a level-progressing process. In any field of study, one must master basic concepts to understand more complex ones. Thus, it is important that during the learning process, that learners are presented and challenged with knowledge which they are able to comprehend (not a level below, not a level too high). In this work we focus on language learners. By gradually improving (complicating) texts, readers are challenged to learn new vocabulary. To achieve such goals, in this paper we propose and evaluate the ‘complicator’ that translates given sentences to a chosen level of higher degree of difficult. The ‘complicator’ is based on natural language processing and information retrieval approaches that perform lexical replacements. We evaluate our methods with an expert-tailored dataset of children books and 30 native English speakers who participated in our user study. Results show that our tool can be of great utility for language learners who are looking for improving vocabulary.