{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/when-is-wall-a-pared-and-when-a-muro","title":"When is Wall a Pared and when a Muro? -- Extracting Rules Governing Lexical Selection","arxiv_id":"2109.06014","date":"2021-09-13","proceeding":null,"authors":["Aditi Chaudhary","Kayo Yin","Antonios Anastasopoulos","Graham Neubig"],"abstract":"Learning fine-grained distinctions between vocabulary items is a key challenge in learning a new language. For example, the noun \"wall\" has different lexical manifestations in Spanish -- \"pared\" refers to an indoor wall while \"muro\" refers to an outside wall. However, this variety of lexical distinction may not be obvious to non-native learners unless the distinction is explained in such a way. In this work, we present a method for automatically identifying fine-grained lexical distinctions, and extracting concise descriptions explaining these distinctions in a human- and machine-readable format. We confirm the quality of these extracted descriptions in a language learning setup for two languages, Spanish and Greek, where we use them to teach non-native speakers when to translate a given ambiguous word into its different possible translations. Code and data are publicly released here (https://github.com/Aditi138/LexSelection)","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.06014v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.06014v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"when-is-wall-a-pared-and-when-a-muro","repo_url":"https://github.com/Aditi138/LexSelection","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2109.06014","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2109.06014","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}