Sense-Specific Lexical Information for Reading Assistance

To support vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension in a second language, we have developed a system to display senseappropriate examples to learners for difficult words. We describe the construction of the system, incorporating word sense disambiguation, and an experiment we conducted testing it on a group of 60 learners of English as a second language (ESL). We show that sensespecific information in an intelligent reading system helps learners in their vocabulary acquisition, even if the sense information contains some noise from automatic processing. We also show that it helps learners, to some extent, with their reading comprehension.