Learner Corpora and Natural Language Processing

Learner corpora collect the language produced by people learning their first or a second language. Natural Language Processing (NLP) deals with the representation and the automatic analysis and generation of human language. The two thus overlap in the representation and automatic analysis of learner language, which constitutes the topic of this chapter. As such, the chapter focuses on one of the two application areas for NLP in the context of language learning (cf. Meurers, 2012), the other one being the use of NLP to process the native language to be learned, for example, to generate exercises, to support retrieval of reading material at the appropriate learner level, or to present texts to learners with visual or other enhancements to support language learning.