Proceedings of the ACL Interactive Poster and Demonstration Sessions,
pages 117–120, Ann Arbor, June 2005. c©2005 Association for Computational Linguistics
Organizing English Reading Materials for Vocabulary Learning
Masao Utiyama, Midori Tanimura and Hitoshi Isahara
National Institute of Information and Communications Technology
3-5 Hikari-dai, Seika-cho, Souraku-gun, Kyoto 619-0289 Japan
{mutiyama,mtanimura,isahara}@nict.go.jp
Abstract
We propose a method of organizing read-
ing materials for vocabulary learning. It
enables us to select a concise set of
reading texts (from a target corpus) that
contains all the target vocabulary to be
learned. We used a specialized vocab-
ulary for an English certification test as
the target vocabulary and used English
Wikipedia, a free-content encyclopedia, as
the target corpus. The organized reading
materials would enable learners not only
to study the target vocabulary efficiently
but also to gain a variety of knowledge
through reading. The reading materials
are available on our web site.
1 Introduction
EFL (English as a foreign language) learners and
teachers can easily access a wide range of English
reading materials on the Internet. For example, cur-
rent news stories can be read on web sites such as
those for CNN,1 TIME,2 or the BBC.3 Specialized
reading materials for EFL learners are also provided
on web sites like EFL Reading.4
This situation, however, does not mean that EFL
learners and teachers can easily select proper texts
suited to their specific purposes, for example, learn-
ing vocabulary through reading. On the contrary,
1http://www.cnn.com/
2http://www.time.com/time/
3http://www.bbc.co.uk/
4http://www.gradedreading.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/
EFL teachers have to carefully select texts, if they
want their students to learn a specialized vocabulary
through reading in a particular discipline such as
medicine, engineering, or economics. However, it is
problematic for teachers to select materials for learn-
ing a target vocabulary with short authentic texts.
It is possible to automate this selection process
given the target vocabulary to be learned and the tar-
get corpus from which texts are gathered (Utiyama
et al., 2004). In this research (Utiyama et al., 2004),
we used a specialized vocabulary for an English
certification test as the target vocabulary and used
newspaper articles from The Daily Yomiuri as the
target corpus. We then organized a set of reading
materials, which we called courseware5, using the
algorithm in Section 2. The courseware consisted
of 116 articles and contained all the target vocabu-
lary. We used the courseware in university English
classes from May 2004 to January 2005. We found
that the courseware was effective in learning vocab-
ulary (Tanimura and Utiyama, in preparation).
Based on the promising results, our next goal is
to distribute courseware (produced with our algo-
rithm) to EFL teachers and learners so that we can
receive wider feedback. To this end, the course-
ware we constructed (Utiyama et al., 2004) is inade-
quate because it was prepared from The Daily Yomi-
uri, which is copyrighted. We therefore replaced
The Daily Yomiuri with English Wikipedia,6 a free-
content encyclopedia, and developed new course-
5Courseware usually includes software in addition to other
materials. However, in this paper, the term courseware is used
to refer to the reading materials only.
6http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main Page
117
ware. It is available on our web site.7
In the following, will we first summarize our al-
gorithm and then describe details on the courseware
we constructed from English Wikipedia.
2 Algorithm
We want to prepare efficient courseware for learning
a target vocabulary. We defined efficiency in terms
of the amount of reading materials that must be read
to learn a required vocabulary. That is, efficient
courseware is as short as possible, while containing
the required vocabulary. We used a greedy method
to develop the efficient courseware (Utiyama et al.,
2004).
Let C be the courseware under development and
V be the target vocabulary to be learned. We iter-
atively select a document (from the target corpus)
that has the largest number of new types8 (types con-
tained in V but not in C) and put it into C until C
covering all of V . “C covers all of V ” means that
each word in V occurs at least once in a document
in C.
More concretely, let Vtodo be the part of V not
covered by C, and let Vdone be V −Vtodo. We iter-
atively put document d into C that maximizes G(·),
G(d|α,Vtodo,Vdone)
= αg(d|Vtodo)+(1−α)g(d|Vdone), (1)
until C covers all of V . We then define g(·) as
g(d|Vx)
= k1 +1k
1((1−b)+b |W(d)|E(|W(·)|))+1
|W(d)∩Vx|, (2)
where W(d) is the set of types in d, E(|W(·)|) is
the average for |W(·)| over the whole corpus, and
k1 and b are parameters that depend on the corpus.
We set k1 as 1.5 and b as 0.75. g(d|Vx) takes a large
value when there is a large number of common types
between W(d) and Vx and d is short. These effects
are due to |W(d)∩Vx| and |W(d)|E(|W(·)|) respectively. As
g(·) is based on the Okapi BM25 function (Robert-
son and Walker, 2000), which has been shown to be
quite efficient in information retrieval,9 we expected
7http://www.kotonoba.net/˜mutiyama/vocabridge/
8A type refers to a unique word, while a token refers to each
occurrence of a type.
9BM25 and its variants have been proven to be quite effi-
cient in information retrieval. Readers are referred to papers by
the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC, http://trec.nist.gov/), for
example.
g(·) to be effective in retrieving documents relevant
to the target vocabulary.
In Eq. (1), α is used to combine the scores of
document d, which are obtained by using Vtodo and
Vdone. It is defined as
α = |Vdone|1+|V
done|
(3)
This implies that even if |W(d) ∩ Vtodo| is 1, it is
as important as |W(d) ∩ Vdone| = |Vdone|. Con-
sequently, G(·) uses documents that have new types
of the given vocabulary in preference to documents
that have covered types.
To summarize, efficient courseware is constructed
by putting document d with maximum G(·) into C
until C covers all of V . This allows us to construct
efficient courseware because G(·) takes a large value
when a document has a large number of new types
and is short.
3 Experiment
This section describes how the courseware was con-
structed by applying the method described in the
previous section. We will first describe the vocab-
ulary and corpus used to construct the courseware
and then present the statistics for the courseware.
3.1 Vocabulary
We used the specialized vocabulary used in the
Test of English for International Communication
(TOEIC) because it is one of the most popular En-
glish certification tests in Japan. The vocabulary was
compiled by Chujo (2003) and Chujo et al. (2004),
who confirmed that the vocabulary was useful in
preparing for the TOEIC test. The vocabulary had
640 entries and we used 638 words from it that oc-
curred at least once in the corpus as the target vocab-
ulary.
3.2 Corpus
We used articles from English Wikipedia as the tar-
get corpus, which is a free-content encyclopedia that
anyone can edit. The version we used in this study
had 478,611 articles. From these, we first discarded
stub and other non-normal articles. We also dis-
carded short articles of less than 150 words. We then
selected 60,498 articles that were referred to (linked)
by more than 15 articles. This 15-link threshold was
118
set empirically to screen out noisy articles. Finally,
we extracted a 150-word excerpt from the lead part
of each of these 60,498 articles to prepare the target
corpus. We set 150-word limit on an empirical basis
to reduce the burden imposed on learners. In short,
the target corpus consisted of 60,498 excerpts from
the English Wikipedia. In the rest of the paper, we
will use the term an article to refer to an excerpt that
was extracted according to this procedure.
3.3 Example article
Figure 1 has an example of the articles in the course-
ware. It was the first article obtained with the al-
gorithm. It shares 27 types and 49 tokens with the
target vocabulary. These words are printed in bold.
Corporate finance
Corporate finance is the specific area of finance dealing with the fi-
nancial decisions corporations make, and the tools and analysis used
to make the decisions. The discipline as a whole may be divided between
long-term and short-term decisions and techniques. Both share the same
goal of enhancing firm value by ensuring that return on capital exceeds
cost of capital. Capital investment decisions comprise the long-term
choices about which projects receive investment, whether to finance that
investment with equity or debt, and when or whether to pay dividends to
shareholders. Short-term corporate finance decisions are called working
capital management and deal with balance of current assets and cur-
rent liabilities by managing cash, inventories, and short-term borrowing
and lending (e.g., the credit terms extended to customers). Corporate fi-
nance is closely related to managerial finance, which is slightly broader in
scope, describing the financial techniques available to all forms of busi-
ness ... (more)
Figure 1: Example article
3.4 Courseware statistics
3.4.1 Basic courseware statistics
Table 1 lists basic statistics for the courseware
constructed from the target vocabulary and corpus.10
The courseware consisted of 131 articles. Each
article was 150 words long because only excerpts
were used. The average number of tokens per ar-
ticle shared with the vocabulary (“num. of com-
mon tokens” in the Table) was 18.4 and that of
types (“num. of common types”) was 12.4. About
12.3%(= 18.4150 × 100) of the tokens in each article
were covered by the vocabulary. Each article in the
10On our web site, we prepared 10 sets of article sets called
course-1 to course-10. These 10 courses were obtained by re-
peatedly applying our algorithm to the English Wikipedia re-
moving articles included in earlier courses. The statistics pre-
sented in this paper were calculated from the first courseware,
course-1.
courseware was referred to by 70.7 articles on av-
erage as can be seen from the bottom row. Table
1 indicates that articles in the courseware included
many target words and were heavily referred to by
other articles.
3.4.2 Distribution of covered types
Figure 2 plots the increase in the number of cov-
ered types against the order (ranking) of articles that
were put into the courseware. The horizontal axis
represents the ranking of articles. The vertical axis
indicates the number of covered types. The increase
was sharpest when the ranking value was lowest (left
of figure). The dotted horizontal lines indicate 50%
and 90% of the target vocabulary. These lines cross
the curved solid line at the 22nd and 83rd articles,
i.e., 16.8% and 63.4% of the courseware, respec-
tively. This means that learners can learn most of the
target vocabulary from the beginning of the course-
ware. This is desirable because learners sometimes
do not have enough time to read all the courseware.
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140
num. of types
a0
article ranking
90%50%
Figure 2: Increase in the number of covered types
3.4.3 Document frequency distribution
Figure 3 has target words that occurred in eight ar-
ticles or more. The numbers in parentheses indicate
the document frequencies (DFs) of the words, where
the DF of a word is the number of articles in which
the word occurred. These words were the most ba-
sic words in the target vocabulary with respect to the
courseware.
Table 2 lists the distribution of DFs. The first
column lists the different DFs of the target words.
The values in the “#DF” column are the numbers of
119
Table 1: Basic courseware statistics (number of articles: 131, length of each article: 150 words)
Average SD Min Median Max
Num. of common tokens 18.4 10.8 1 16 55
Num. of common types 12.4 5.5 1 12 27
Num. of incoming links 70.7 145.3 16 32 1056
SD means standard deviation.
words that occurred in the corresponding DF arti-
cles. The “CUM” and “CUM%” columns show the
cumulative numbers and percentages of words cal-
culated from the values in the second column. As we
can see from Table 2, more than 50% of the target
words occurred in multiple articles. Consequently,
learners were likely to be sufficiently exposed to ef-
ficiently learn the target vocabulary.
service (19), form (17), information (12), feature (12), op-
eration (11), cost (11), individual (10), department (10),
consumer (9), company (9), product (9), complete (9),
range (9), law (9), associate (9), cause (9), consider (9),
offer (9), provide (9), present (8), activity (8), due (8),
area (8), bill (8), require (8), order (8)
Figure 3: Target words and their DFs.
Table 2: Document frequency distribution
DF #DF CUM CUM%
19 1 1 0.2
17 1 2 0.3
12 2 4 0.6
11 2 6 0.9
10 2 8 1.3
9 11 19 3.0
8 7 26 4.1
7 20 46 7.2
6 25 71 11.1
5 35 106 16.6
4 36 142 22.3
3 71 213 33.4
2 118 331 51.9
1 307 638 100.0
4 Conclusion
While many teachers agree that vocabulary learn-
ing can be fostered by presenting words in context
rather than isolating them from this, it is very dif-
ficult to prepare reading materials that contain the
specialized vocabulary to be learned. We have pro-
posed a method of automating this preparation pro-
cess (Utiyama et al., 2004). We have found that our
reading materials prepared from The Daily Yomiuri
were effective in vocabulary learning (Tanimura and
Utiyama, in preparation).
Our next goal is to distribute courseware (pro-
duced with our algorithm) to EFL teachers and
learners so that we can receive wider feedback. To
this end, we replaced The Daily Yomiuri, which
is copyrighted, with the English Wikipedia, which
is a free-content encyclopedia, and developed new
courseware whose statistics were presented and dis-
cussed in this paper. This courseware, which is
available on our web site, can be used to supplement
classroom learning activities as well as self-study.
We hope it will help EFL learners to learn and teach-
ers to teach a broader range of vocabulary.
References
K. Chujo, T. Ushida, A. Yamazaki, M. Genung, A. Uchi-
bori, and C. Nishigaki. 2004. Bijuaru beishikku
niyoru TOEIC-yoo goiryoku yoosei sofutowuea no
shisaku (3) [The development of English CD-ROM
material to teach vocabulary for the TOEIC test (uti-
lizing Visual Basic): Part 3]. Journal of the College of
Industrial Technology, Nihon University, 37, 29-43.
K. Chujo. 2003. Eigo shokyuushamuke TOEIC Goi 1 &
2 no sentei to sono kouka [Selecting TOEIC vocabu-
lary 1 & 2 for beginning-level students and measuring
its effect on a sample TOEIC test]. Journal of the Col-
lege of Industrial Technology Nihon University, 36:
27-42.
S. E. Robertson and S. Walker. 2000. Okapi/Keenbow at
TREC-8. In Proc. of TREC 8, pages 151–162.
Midori Tanimura and Masao Utiyama. in prepara-
tion. Reading materials for learning TOEIC vocabu-
lary based on corpus data.
Masao Utiyama, Midori Tanimura, and Hitoshi Isahara.
2004. Constructing English reading courseware. In
PACLIC-18, pages 173–179.
120
