# When is Wall a Pared and when a Muro? -- Extracting Rules Governing Lexical Selection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.06014 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06014/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Quantifying Attention Flow in Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00928/) (2020)
- [Stanza: A Python Natural Language Processing Toolkit for Many Human Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07082/) (2020)
- [Word Alignment by Fine-tuning Embeddings on Parallel Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08231/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Teacher Perception of Automatically Extracted Grammar Concepts for L2 Language Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05154/) (2022)
- [Using Language Models to Disambiguate Lexical Choices in Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05781/) (2024)
- [Speaking of Language: Reflections on Metalanguage Research in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02645/) (2026)
- [Teacher Perception of Automatically Extracted Grammar Concepts for L2 Language Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18417/) (2023)
- [LLM Agents as Computational Typologists](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07791/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Learning fine-grained distinctions between vocabulary items is a key challenge in learning a new language. For example, the noun "wall" has different lexical manifestations in Spanish -- "pared" refers to an indoor wall while "muro" refers to an outside wall. However, this variety of lexical distinction may not be obvious to non-native learners unless the distinction is explained in such a way. In this work, we present a method for automatically identifying fine-grained lexical distinctions, and extracting concise descriptions explaining these distinctions in a human- and machine-readable format. We confirm the quality of these extracted descriptions in a language learning setup for two languages, Spanish and Greek, where we use them to teach non-native speakers when to translate a given ambiguous word into its different possible translations. Code and data are publicly released here (https://github.com/Aditi138/LexSelection)