  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)
