Generalization support environment for understanding ways to use English words

Abstract

When we translate Japanese sentence into English, sometimes several English words become the candidates. However, the usage situation of these candidate words is not the same. In order to choose appropriate words from them, we need to understand the usage situation for each candidate words. Usage situation of the words can be inferred by co-existing words in their example sentences. Co-existing words in example sentences are not always the same, so in order to understand usage situation, we need to generalize co-existing words from several example sentences. However, some of us who do not consciously generalize the co-existing words do not acquire the usage situation. This paper proposes the system which provides the environment where we can explicitly generalize co-existing words (keywords) in the example sentences to acquire the usage situation of the target words. This system also has a generalization support mechanism to provide concepts of words acquired through WordNet as hints. According to the experimental results, participants who used the system in learning English words reduced the number of incorrectly choosing the words and promoted to derive the own understanding of the usage situation.