Abstract Subject extraposition (e.g. it is important to remember ) generally considered be a formal construction that learners, whose writing often said overly informal, have been found struggle with. This study investigates what extent register and text type can used explore learners’ reportedly “informal” use of this construction. Learner compared expert from several different registers nativ...

  This paper investigates the use of ‘lexical bundles’ in two broad corpora of journalistic writing. The aim of this study is to compare the use of lexical bundles in the two domains, one consisted of newspaper articles written in English and published in England and the other one comprised of newspaper articles written in Persian from Iranian publications. For this purpose, the frequency...

Our efforts in the 2013 NLI shared task focused on the potential benefits of external corpora. We show that including training data from multiple corpora is highly effective at robust, cross-corpus NLI (i.e. open-training task 1), particularly when some form of domain adaptation is also applied. This method can also be used to boost performance even when training data from the same corpus is av...

Fill-in-the-blank items are commonly featured in computer-assisted language learning (CALL) systems. An item displays a sentence with a blank, and often proposes a number of choices for filling it. These choices should include one correct answer and several plausible distractors. We describe a system that, given an English corpus, automatically generates distractors to produce items for preposi...

Despite a mere decade of existence, the field of computer learner corpus (CLC) research has been the focus of so much active international work that it seems worth taking a retrospective look at the research accomplished to date and considering the prospects for future research in both Second Language Acquisition (SLA) studies and Foreign Language Teaching (FLT) that emerge. One of the main dis...

We describe a system that grades learner answers in reading comprehension tests in the context of foreign language learning. This task, also known as short answer scoring, essentially requires determining whether a semantic entailment relationship holds between an individual learner answer and a target answer; thus semantic information is a necessary part of any automatic short answer scoring s...

Lexical bundles are empirically derived formulaic units of language which are register-specifi c and perform a variety of discourse functions. Because these units of language contribute to the linguistic make up of specifi c registers, they can be important indicators for determining the success of language users within these discourse communities. Therefore, language learners need to assimilat...

This paper describes an ongoing project in which we are collecting a learner corpus of Arabic, developing a tagset for error annotation and performing Computer-aided Error Analysis (CEA) on the data. We adapted the French Interlanguage Database FRIDA tagset (Granger, 2003a) to the data. We chose FRIDA in order to follow a known standard and to see whether the changes needed to move from a Frenc...

Corpus studies of native speaker and learner language have been influential in informing syllabus design and course content in foreign or second language (L2) teaching. Corpora can also be explored directly by the learner, in what Johns (1991) has called ―data-driven learning‖ (DDL). Such an approach is alleged to have many advantages, including fostering learner autonomy, increasing language a...

This talk is concerned with using syntactic annotation of learner language and the corresponding target hypothesis to find structural acquisition difficulties in German as a foreign language. Using learner data for the study of acquisition patterns is based on the idea that learners do not produce random output but rather possess a consistent internal grammar (interlanguage; cf. [1] and many ot...