V for vocab: An intelligent flashcard application

Abstract

Students choose to use flashcard applications available on the Internet to help memorize word-meaning pairs. This is helpful for tests such as GRE, TOEFL or IELTS, which emphasize on verbal skills. However, monotonous nature of flashcard applications can be diminished with the help of Cognitive Science through Testing Effect. Experimental evidences have shown that memory tests are an important tool for long term retention (Roediger and Karpicke, 2006). Based on these evidences, we developed a novel flashcard application called “V for Vocab” that implements short answer based tests for learning new words. Furthermore, we aid this by implementing our short answer grading algorithm which automatically scores the user's answer. The algorithm makes use of an alternate thesaurus instead of traditional Wordnet and delivers state-of-the-art performance on popular word similarity datasets. We also look to lay the foundation for analysis based on implicit data collected from our application.