Automating Multi-Level Annotations of Orthographic Properties of German Words and Children’s Spelling Errors

This paper presents the automatic annotation of orthographic properties of German words and spelling errors in texts of German primary school children according to a new multi-layered annotation scheme [1]. The scheme is closely linked to the principles of the German writing system and is supposed to allow the pursuit of new research questions concerning the relationship between spelling errors of competent and less competent spellers and the regularities of the German graphematic system. A novelty of the automatic annotation is that it takes an intended, correctly spelled word as input and applies a set of rules to generate a list of error candidates containing systematic spelling errors. As a further novelty, the annotation of additional wordand error-related properties is presented such as whether the spelling error changes the word’s pronunciation and whether a spelling can be derived from a related word form. This gives rise to more detailed analyses of the errors but also allows us to develop an application for learners that generates automatic advice for the correct spelling. A first evaluation shows that the automatic annotation of the presented categories and features can come close to human annotations.