Abstract of Daniel Gorin’s keynote

Unlocking the power of the Oxford Learners’ dictionaries for receptive and productive vocabulary‐acquisition.

In his keynote presentation, Alphary founder Daniel Gorin will present the company’s first product – a corpus linguistics and AI­based English vocabulary app developed in collaboration with OUP.

The Alphary team believes that in the knowledge economy, communication skills are paramount. And in the global knowledge economy, English language communication skills are vital for professional success, social mobility and personal fulfilment.

With English, as with any language, the key to effective communication is vocabulary. Other aspects of language – grammar and pronunciation, for example – are important, too, and without them little can be communicated. But without words, nothing can be communicated. Words mean the world.

Alphary’s mission is to harness the power of natural language processing and link it to the resources of the world’s best language reference materials, including the suite of Oxford dictionaries, in order to transform the way that vocabulary – and language ­ is learnt.

The “Oxford Vocabulary Trainer powered by Alphary” is the first product in the spirit of this mission. It is an adaptive vocabulary learning app for intermediate and pre­intermediate students. It teaches words, phrases and lexical chunks from some of OUP’s popular course books, and it focuses learners’ attention on collocations, word patterns and style, as well as meaning with its unique, intelligent “Feedback Butterfly” (Feebu).