mircea

Zeeguu

Almost 20,000 people were enrolled in Danish classes in 2021. At the global level more than 1.2 billion are learning a new language at any given moment.

Zeeguu is a project that aims to support learners of foreign languages accelerate the acquisition of their vocabulary by a three-pronged approach:

1. Automatically finding relevant materials on the Internet for them
2. Supporting their reading with translation and pronunciation
3. Strengthening retention with the use of automatically and personally generated vocabulary exercises

The architecture of Zeeguu includes both a browser extension and a web application that communicate with each other.

• Source code: github.com/zeeguu
• Online: zeeguu.org (try it with the zeeguu-beta invite code)
• Contributors: many students over the years

Presentations

2022: Can we make learning foreign languages more personalized?

• Invited talk at University of Lausanne

2021: Lessons Learned Developing a Personalized Language Learning System

• Keynote at EASEAI: International Workshop on Education, Software Engineering, and AI

Papers

As We May Study: Towards the Web as a Personalized Language Textbook - in this paper we introduce the project - we report on a study of using it in a highschool French class in the Netherlands - students are positive about it and take advantage of the opportunity of reading on the topics that they like

Bootstrapping an ubiquitous monitoring ecosystem for accelerating vocabulary acquisition - a paper that presents a generic ecosystem architecture of which Zeeguu is an instantiation

Analyzing user interactions to estimate reading time in web-based L2 reader applications - paper with Nora Hollenstein - we describe how one can estimate reading time on the web when they study free reading in the wild

Reports & Theses

Audio in Digital Learning Environments - a controlled experiment with 22 participants shows that users find zeeguu with audio-focused exercises more fun and increases the likelyhood that they’ll use it in the future

Supporting Foreign Language Learning With a Browser Extension - thesis introducing an architecture for a browser extension for Zeeguu - half of 32 participants prefer the browser extension which cleans up an article page to the original page; the extension also adds interactive translation and pronunciation for reading - the thesis also discusses challenges with maintaining such a browser extension

In Progress

• Better and more precise time-measurement on the platform (include exercises, include reviewing words, show the timer in real time, pause when inactive, etc.)
• More diverse exercises: e.g. reorder parts of sentence into whole with drag and drop
• Better personalized recommendations
• Improved difficulty recommendation
• Better topic assignment to articles

Roadmap

(prioritized)

• Unifying the reader between the extension and the web application
• Better and more meaningful progress feedback
• Creating mobile applications for the various platforms; probably with a cross-platform tech, e.g. Flutter
• Adding support for video
• Improve the ElasticSearch

Open Research Questions

• The integration of a chat systems and role-playing in language learning
• Alternative UI inspired from “swiping apps” - show one article at a time; allow the user to mark it as not interesting; save for later; read more… what is the impact of this on engagement
• A social component: allow the learners in a class see each other’s activity; allow seeing social feedback on existing articles
• Research questions that should be answereed
  • how important is the difficulty estimator given that Zeeguu supports the reader also with translations - so they can read texts that are harder than their level; how much harder than their level can they read now?
  • how to evaluate the efficiency of the exercise scheduling algorithm?

Inspiration

• For polyglots, the native language is still more special than all the others in that