MEANS: Moving Effective Assonances for Novice Students

Vocabulary acquisition constitutes a crucial but difficult and time consuming step of learning a foreign language. There exist several teaching methods which aim to facilitate this step by providing learners with various verbal and visual tips. However, building systems based on these methods is generally very costly since it requires so many resources such as time, money and human labor. In this paper, we introduce a fully automatized vocabulary teaching system which uses state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval (IR) techniques. For each foreign word the user is willing to learn, the system is capable of automatically producing memorization tips including key- words, sentences, colors, textual animations and images.