Human language abilities are far richer than what is represented in the kinds of monolingual corpora that are standardly used to evaluate statistical models of language learning. This article summarizes a series of findings from language acquisition, crosslanguage typology, and language processing, that illustrate the challenges that any serious model of natural language syntax must meet. Even ...

It is becoming more common to use corpora of second language learner data in order to support research on various second language acquisition (SLA) topics (e.g., Römer, 2009; Wulff et al., 2009), but there has been little use of corpus annotation. For many questions in SLA research, using a corpus is simple and in no need of annotation: one can search a corpus for specific words to find relevan...

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...

With the aim of storing learner corpora as well as information about the Basque language students who wrote the texts, two different but complementary databases were created: ERREUS and IRAKAZI. Linguistic and technical information (error description, error category, tools for detection/correction...) will be stored in ERREUS, while IRAKAZI will be filled in with psycholinguistic information (e...

Collocations in the sense of idiosyncratic binary lexical co-occurrences are one of the biggest challenges for any language learner. Even advanced learners make collocation mistakes in that they literally translate collocation elements from their native tongue, create new words as collocation elements, choose a wrong subcategorization for one of the elements, etc. Therefore, automatic collocati...

This paper describes an ongoing collaborative project, between Japanese and U.S. universities, that aims to build, analyze and use comparable learner corpora in an attempt to promote discourse-level proficiency in foreign language learning contexts. The focus is placed on discourse coherence created by reference to nominal and clausal entities. The corpus analysis results, within the framework ...

This paper reports the compilation of a corpus of Taiwanese students’ spoken English, which is one of the twenty subcorpora of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) (Gilquin et al., 2010). LINDSEI is one of the largest corpora of learner speech. The compilation process follows the design criteria of LINDSEI so as to ensure comparability across sub-corpora....

Abstract This paper focuses on automatically assessing language proficiency levels according to linguistic complexity in learner English. We implement a supervised learning approach as part of an automatic essay scoring system. The objective is uncover Common European Framework Reference for Languages (CEFR) criterial features writings by learners English foreign language. Our method relies the...

Effective use of translation products and services depends on professional and learner translators familiarity with different translation procedures, strategies and tools, currently available for solving specific translation problems. In this poster we will focus on the use of language independent alignment-based technology, applied to parallel corpora, for effectively aiding translation learni...