An Experiment on Implicitly Crowdsourcing Expert Knowledge about Romanian Synonyms from L1 Language Learners

Lionel Nicolas

Abstract: In this paper, we present an experiment performed with the aim of evaluating if linguistic knowledge of expert quality about Romanian synonyms could be crowdsourced from L1 language learners, learning Romanian as their mother tongue, by collecting and aggregating their answers to two types of questions that are automatically generated from a dataset, encoding semantic relations between words. Such an evaluation aimed at confirming the viability of a fully learner-fueled crowdsourcing workflow for improving such type of dataset. For this experiment, we reused an existing open-source crowdsourcing vocabulary trainer that we designed for this very purpose and which crowdsourcing potential needed further evaluation, especially with regards to lesser-resourced languages such as Romanian. Our results confirmed that producing expert knowledge regarding Romanian synonyms could be achieved in such a fashion. Additionally, we took the occasion to further evaluate the learning impact of the trainer on the participants and gather their feedback regarding several aspects.