Motion Verbs in Learner Corpora

Spoken English Learner Corpora

In this paper we present a survey of some most significant spoken English learner corpora created up to date. Spoken learner corpora which include speech generated by learners are important in many areas of research and practice, in particular, for identifying typical pronunciation errors of learners of English as a second language (ESL), English as a foreign language (EFL), or English as a lin...

On Annotating Learner Corpora

Dependency Annotation for Learner Corpora

Building from the CHILDES dependency annotation scheme and on interlanguage POS annotation, we describe a syntactic annotation scheme developed for the data of second language learners. We encode subcategorization frames and underlying dependencies, in addition to the usual surface dependencies. The annotation scheme is relatively independent of language and can be mapped to learner errors.

Native Language Detection with ‘Cheap’ Learner Corpora

We begin by showing that the best publicly available, multiple-L1 learner corpus, the International Corpus of Learner English (Granger et al. 2009), has serious issues when used for the task of native language detection (NLD). The topic biases in the corpus are a confounding factor that result in crossvalidated performance that is misleading, for all the feature types which are traditionally us...

Identifying Phrasal Verbs Using Many Bilingual Corpora

We address the problem of identifying multiword expressions in a language, focusing on English phrasal verbs. Our polyglot ranking approach integrates frequency statistics from translated corpora in 50 different languages. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that combining statistical evidence from many parallel corpora using a novel ranking-oriented boosting algorithm produces a comprehen...