We demonstrate how data-driven approaches to learner corpora can support Second Language Acquisition research when integrated with visualisation tools. We employ a visual user interface supporting the investigation of a set of automatically determined features discriminating between pass and fail First Certificate in English (FCE) exam scripts. We illustrate how the interface can support the in...

Conclusion Context: A sketch of our research perspective Analyzing learner language I Intelligent Tutoring System TAGARELA for Portuguese (Amaral & Meurers 2008, 2009, 2011; Amaral et al. 2011) I Automatic analysis of learner language (Meurers 2009) I Linguistic analysis of NOCE corpus of English written by Spanish learners (Dı́az-Negrillo, Meurers, Valera & Wunsch 2010) I Word order errors (Met...

This paper explores the issue of automatically generated ungrammatical data and its use in error detection, with a focus on the task of classifying a sentence as grammatical or ungrammatical. We present an error generation tool called GenERRate and show how GenERRate can be used to improve the performance of a classifier on learner data. We describe initial attempts to replicate Cambridge Learn...

In this paper, we present evidence that the acquisition of the phrase structure of a natural language is possible without supervision and with a very small initial grammar. We describe a language learner that extracts distributional information from a corpus annotated with parts of speech and is able to use this extracted information to accurately parse short sentences. The phrase structure lea...

Using an error-annotated learner corpus as the basis, the goal of this paper is two-fold: (i) to evaluate the practicality of the annotation scheme by computing inter-annotator agreement on a non-trivial sample of data, and (ii) to find out whether the application of automated linguistic annotation tools (taggers, spell checkers and grammar checkers) on the learner text is viable as a substitut...

In this paper we report on the design and development of an online search platform for the MERLIN1 corpus of learner texts in Czech, German and Italian. It was created in the context of the MERLIN project, which aims at empirically illustrating features of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) for evaluating language competences based on authentic learner text productions compiled i...

The present study examines the interface between syntax and discourse-pragmatics in the production of verb second (V2) structures in a corpus of English texts by advanced L1 German and Dutch speakers. The evidence shows that the residual V2 produced by the learner groups studied is the result of a deficit at the interface rather than the transfer of narrow V2 syntax per se. The analysis offered...

Collocational deficiency is a pervasive phenomenon in learner English. Language learners often fail to choose the correct combination of two or more words due to their unawareness of collocational properties in vocabulary. They are apt to adopt lexical simplification strategies such as using a synonymous or Ll-influenced expression. This paper presents a corpus-based study on the collocational ...