Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2014 / KoKo: an L1 Learner Corpus for German

KoKo: an L1 Learner Corpus for German

Summary

The paper presents KoKo, a corpus of texts written by German-speaking students for whom German is their native language (L1). The corpus is annotated for errors. The authors note that accessible, linguistically annotated corpora of this kind hardly exist for German. Existing collections are either closed to researchers, lack annotation, or are too small. In May 2011, upper secondary school students from North Tyrol, South Tyrol and Thuringia wrote texts during regular lessons, one year before their final examinations, and filled in a questionnaire about themselves. The L1 corpus comprises texts by 1,319 authors, roughly 716 thousand tokens. The handwritten texts were transcribed, and orthographic errors and their corrected forms were annotated manually. Tokenization, sentence splitting and POS tagging were done automatically with IMS TreeTagger. Quality was checked several times during the work, and the final version was evaluated on a random sample that was turned into a gold standard. Transcription and tokenization are nearly flawless. The annotation of orthographic errors is noticeably weaker, at about 80%. Token-level POS tagging accuracy is close to what is typical for German. The resource is useful for studying how writing in the native language develops, for teachers, and as test data for NLP tools that process non-standard texts.

Key points

  • Data collection: 1,511 students from 85 classes in 66 schools in three countries (Austria, Italy, Germany) took part. Of these, 82.7%, i.e. 1,319 people, are native speakers of German. The L1 corpus contains 46,734 sentences. The texts are accompanied by metadata from the questionnaires: gender, age, socio-economic data, language biography, and reading and writing habits.
  • Quality evaluation: a sample of 255 sentences (about 4,800 tokens, 0.54% of the corpus). Transcription — 99.65%, orthographic error annotation — ~80.3%, tokenization — 99.98%, sentence splitting — 96.86%, POS tags — 94.7% of tokens.
  • Shortcomings of POS tagging: only 42.3% of sentences have no POS errors at all. The authors attribute this to known systematic weaknesses of TreeTagger. Tags were assigned to the orthographically corrected version of the text to bring it closer to standard German.
  • Grammatical errors: a subsample of 597 texts was additionally annotated for grammatical errors. Next, the authors plan to assess the quality of these texts (cohesion, coherence, composition) and to annotate lexical errors.
  • Access: the corpus was promised to be made available via ANNIS at the end of 2014, probably in the PAULA format. KoKo is part of the Korpus Südtirol initiative (EURAC, Bolzano) and is meant to become the first accessible linguistically annotated corpus of L1 German.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages · Education

Topics: Part-of-speech tagging

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{abel2014koko,
  title = {{KoKo: an L1 Learner Corpus for German}},
  author = {Abel, Andrea and Glaznieks, Aivars and Nicolas, Lionel and Stemle, Egon},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)},
  year = {2014},
  doi = {10.63317/2d27mwrqrixk},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/2d27mwrqrixk}
}

References

44 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Abel, A. and Anstein, S. (2011). Korpus Südtirol-Varietätenlinguistische Untersuchungen. In Abel, A. and Zanin, R., editors, Korpusinstrumente in Lehre und Forschung, pages 29–54. University Press Bozen. find
  2. Abel, A., Vettori, C., and Forer, D. (2012). Learning the neighbours language: the many challenges in achieving a real multilingual society. In European Centre for Minority Issues and European Academy Bozen/Bolzano, editor, European Yearbook of Minority Issues, pages 271– 304. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. find
  3. Abel, A., Wisniewski, K., Nicolas, L., Boyd, A., Hana, J., and Meurers, D. (in print). A trilingual learner corpus illustrating European reference levels. In Proceedings of the Learner Corpus Research 2013 Conference (LCR2013). ↗
  4. Aijmer, K., editor. (2009). Corpora and Language Teaching. John Benjamins. find
  5. Ammon, U., Bickel, H., Ebner, J., Esterhammer, R., Gasser, M., Hofer, L., Kellermeier-Rehbein, B., Löffler, H., Mangott, D., Moser, H., Schläpfer, R., Schloss-macher, M., Schmidlin, R., and Vallaster, G., editors. (2004). Variantenwörterbuch des Deutschen. Die Standardsprache in Österreich, der Schweiz und Deutschland sowie in Liechtenstein, Luxemburg, Ostbelgien und Südtirol. de Gruyter. find
  6. Augst, G., Disselhoff, K., Henrich, A., Pohl, T., and Völzing, P. (2007). Text-Sorten-Kompetenz. Peter Lang. find
  7. Berg, M., Berkemeier, A., Funke, R., Glück, C., Hofbauer, C., and Schneider, J. (2010). Sprachliche Heterogenität in der Sprachheil- und der Regelschule. find
  8. Clyne, M. G. (1992). German as a pluricentric language. In Clyne, M. G., editor, Pluricentric languages. Differing norms in different nations, pages 117–148. De Gruyter. ↗
  9. Council of Europe. (2001). Common European framework of reference for languages: learning, teaching, assessment. Council of Europe Publ. find
  10. Dı́az-Negrillo, A. and Domı́nguez, J. F. (2006). Error tagging systems for learner corpora. Revista española de lingüı́stica aplicada, 19:83–102. find
  11. Duden. (2005). Die Grammatik. Bibliographisches Institut. find
  12. Duden. (2006). Die deutsche Rechtschreibung. Bibliographisches Institut. find
  13. Fix, M. and Melenk, H. (2002). Schreiben zu Texten-Schreiben zu Bildimpulsen. Schneider-Verlag Hohengehren. find
  14. Fuhrhop, N. (2005). Orthografie. Universitätsverlag Winter. find
  15. Glaznieks, A., Nicolas, L., Stemle, E., Abel, A., and Lyding, V. (2014). Establishing a standardised procedure for building learner corpora. Apples Journal of Applied Language Studies, 8(1). find
  16. Grabowski, J., Blabusch, C., and Lorenz, T. (2007). Welche Schreibkompetenz? Handschrift und Tastatur in der Hauptschule. In Becker-Mrotzek, M. and Schindler, K., editors, Texte schreiben, pages 41–62. Gilles und Francke. find
  17. Granger, S., Meunier, F., and Gilquin, G. (2013). Twenty Years of Learner Research: Looking Back, Moving Ahead, volume 1. Presses universitaires de Louvain. find
  18. Granger, S. (2003). Error-tagged learner corpora and CALL: A promising synergy. CALICO journal, 20(3):465–480. find
  19. Hana, J., Rosen, A., Škodová, S., and Štindlová, B. (2010). Error-tagged learner corpus of Czech. In Proceedings of the Fourth Linguistic Annotation Workshop, pages 11– 19. Association for Computational Linguistics. find
  20. Hana, J., Rosen, A., Stindlová, B., and Jäger, P. (2012). Building a learner corpus. In LREC12, pages 3228– 3232. ↗
  21. Hancke, J., Vajjala, S., and Meurers, D. (2012). Readability classification for german using lexical, syntactic, and morphological features. In COLING, pages 1063–1080. find
  22. Hanser, C., Nussbaumer, M., and Sieber, P. (1994). Was sich in geschriebenen Texten zeigt. In Sieber, P., editor, Sprachfähigkeiten–besser als ihr Ruf und nötiger denn je, pages 187–301. Sauerländer. find
  23. Hawkins, J. A. and Filipović, L. (2012). Criterial Features in L2 English: Specifying the reference levels of the Common European Framework. Cambridge University Press. find
  24. Jarvis, S., Castaneda-Jiménez, G., and Nielsen, R. (2012). Detecting l2 writers’ l1s on the basis of their lexical styles. In Jarvis, S. and Crossley, S. A., editors, Approaching language transfer through text classification: Explorations in the detection-based approach, pages 34– 70. ↗
  25. Klieme, E. (2008). Unterricht und Kompetenzerwerb in Deutsch und Englisch: Ergebnisse der DESI-Studie. Verlagsgruppe Beltz. find
  26. Lüdeling, A., Walter, M., Kroymann, E., and Adolphs, P. (2005). Multi-level error annotation in learner corpora. Proceedings of corpus linguistics 2005. find
  27. Meurers, D. (2013). Natural language processing and language learning. In Chapelle, C. A., editor, Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, pages 1–13. Blackwell. ↗
  28. Müller, C. and Strube, M. (2006). Multi-level annotation of linguistic data with MMAX2. Corpus technology and language pedagogy: New resources, new tools, new methods, 3:197–214. find
  29. Nesselhauf, N. (2005). Collocations in a learner corpus, volume 14. John Benjamins. find
  30. Nussbaumer, M. and Sieber, P. (1994). Texte analysieren mit dem Zürcher Textanalyseraster. In Sieber, P., editor, Sprachfähigkeiten–besser als ihr Ruf und nötiger denn je, pages 141–186. Sauerländer. find
  31. O’Donnell, M. B. and Römer, U. (2012). From student hard drive to web corpus (part 2): The annotation and online distribution of the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP). Corpora, 7(1). ↗
  32. Reznicek, M., Ludeling, A., Krummes, C., Schwantuschke, F., Walter, M., Schmidt, K., Hirschmann, H., and Andreas, T. (2012). Das Falko-Handbuch. Korpusaufbau und Annotationen Version 2.01. Technical report, Department of German Studies and Linguistics, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. find
  33. Reznicek, M., Lüdeling, A., and Hirschmann, H. (2013). Competing target hypotheses in the Falko Corpus: A flexible multi-layer corpus architecture. In Dı́az-Negrillo, A., Ballier, N., and Thompson, P., editors, Automatic Treatment and Analysis of Learner Corpus Data, pages 101–123. John Benjamins. ↗
  34. Römer, U. and O’Donnell, M. B. (2011). From student hard drive to web corpus (part 1): the design, compilation and genre classification of the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP). Corpora, 6(2). ↗
  35. Schmid, H. (1994). Probabilistic part-of-speech tagging using decision trees. In Proceedings of international conference on new methods in language processing, volume 12, pages 44–49. Manchester, UK. find
  36. Schmid, H. (1995). Improvements in part-of-speech tagging with an application to german. In In Proceedings of the ACL SIGDAT-Workshop. Citeseer. find
  37. Spinelli, B. and Parizzi, F., editors. (2010). Profilo della lingua italiana. La Nuova Italia. find
  38. Thelen, T. (2010). Automatische Analyse orthographis-cher Leistungen von Schreibanfängern. Ph.D. thesis, Dissertation. find
  39. Vajjala, S. and Meurers, D. (2012). On improving the accuracy of readability classification using insights from second language acquisition. In Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA7), pages 163–173, Montreal, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics. find
  40. Zeldes, A., Ritz, J., Lüdeling, A., and Chiarcos, C. (2009). ANNIS: A search tool for multi-layer annotated corpora. In Proceedings of corpus linguistics, volume 9. find
  41. Zifonun, G., Hoffmann, L., and Strecker, B. (1997). IDS: Grammatik der Deutschen Sprache. find
  42. Zinsmeister, H. and Breckle, M. (2012). The ALeSKo learner corpus. Multilingual Corpora and Multilingual Corpus Analysis, 14:71–96. ↗
  43. Zinsmeister, H., Reznicek, M., Brede, J. R., Rosén, C., and Skiba, D. (2012). Das Wissenschaftliche Netzwerk ”Kobalt-DaF”. Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik, 40(3):457–458. find
  44. Zipser, F. and Romary, L. (2010). A model oriented approach to the mapping of annotation formats using standards. In Workshop on Language Resource and Language Technology Standards, LREC 2010. find

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/abel-2014-koko-l1-learner-corpus-german/