PolylexFLE : A MWE database for French L2 language learners

Todirascu, Amalia François, Thomas [UCL] Cargill, Marion

MWE knowledge is key in the process of learning a foreign language, but its teaching remains hindered by the lack of list of expressions connected to pedagogical aims. In this paper, we present an extended version of the PolylexFLE database, containing 4,525 French multiword expressions (MWE) of three types: idioms, collocations or fixed expressions. In order to propose exercises following the difficulty scale of the European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), we used a mixed approach (manual and automatic) to annotate 1,186 expressions according to the CEFR levels. The paper focuses mostly on the automatic procedure that first identifies the expressions from the PolylexFLE database (and their variants) in a corpus of pedagogical texts (with CEFR labels) using a pattern-based system. In a second step, their distribution in this corpus is estimated and transformed into a single CEFR level. The automatic approach proposed is finally evaluated by 52 French as foreign language learners.