Design and Development of a Subtitle Summarization System for Vocabulary Learning

Abstract

Videos are good for learning vocabulary, since they present the vocabulary in the context of natural dialogs. However, general videos do not provide good supports for language learners. This paper presents a subtitle summarization system, which is designed for vocabulary learning. The system can help a learner watch only meaningful scenes that contain the suitable vocabulary. Using the system, a learner can acquire vocabulary more efficiently since the suitable vocabulary is extracted based on the learning level of the learner. To investigate whether the system enhances learning efficiency or not, an evaluation experiment was conducted. The learning efficiency means the score of vocabulary test compared to the length of the learning time. Experimental participants were intermediate-level learners studying Japanese. They were divided into two groups: the experimental group with our system and control group with a system by a previous work. However, though our system seemed to be more advantageous, the result of the experiment showed no significant difference between two groups. The considerable reason for this result is that the summarization feature of the system is not effective enough since the contexts of the video contents are not considered when the system extracts subtitles containing the suitable vocabulary.