A meaning-based academic vocabulary list

Students must have a strong vocabulary to comprehend academic texts effectively. To assist with this, several academic word lists have been developed. However, there is an ongoing debate in the literature about whether to include common words, such as “paper” and “state”, in these lists. This conflict arises because previous studies did not differentiate between the various meanings of these words. In this article, we used a large language model, BERT, to semantically annotate English corpora, treating each sense of a word separately. As a result, we developed a meaning-based academic vocabulary list, comprising 1550 words (or lexemes) that focus solely on their academic meanings. The words on this list are found to be common across different disciplines, more frequently used in academic texts, and representative in various academic corpora. By categorizing “paper” (meaning “a sheet”) as a general word while “paper” (meaning “an essay”) as an academic word, this article effectively solved the debate over whether certain common words should be included in an academic vocabulary list.