According to the analysis of Cambridge Learner Corpus, using a wrong verb is the most common type of grammatical errors. This paper describes Verb Replacer, a system for detecting and correcting potential verb errors in a given sentence. In our approach, alternative verbs are considered to replace the verb based on an errorannotated corpus and verb-object collocations. The method involves apply...

Annotating non-native speech on a phonetic level is an extremely labour-intensive task and therefore requires a proper balance between the expected benefit and the resources needed. This paper reports on the experience gained when collecting and annotating a corpus of English sentences recorded by students with Italian and German as their mother tongue. The annotated data were used intensively ...

In this paper we investigate the role of the placement of pauses in automatically extracted multi-word expression (MWE) candidates from a learner corpus. The aim is to explore whether the analysis of pauses might be useful in the validation of these candidates as MWEs. The study is based on the assumption advanced in the area of psycholinguistics that MWEs are stored holistically in the mental ...

This paper presents our recent work on period disambiguation, the kernel problem in sentence boundary identification, with the maximum entropy (Maxent) model. A number of experiments are conducted on PTB-II WSJ corpus for the investigation of how context window, feature space and lexical information such as abbreviated and sentence-initial words affect the learning performance. Such lexical inf...

This paper presents work on how we can link word lists derived from learner corpora to target proficiency levels for lexical complexity analysis. The word lists present frequency distributions over different proficiency levels. We present a mapping approach which takes these distributions and maps each word to a single proficiency level. We are also investigating how we can evaluate the mapping...

A common focus of systems in Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning (ICALL) is to provide immediate feedback to language learners working on exercises. Most of this research has focused on providing feedback on the form of the learner input. Foreign language practice and second language acquisition research, on the other hand, emphasizes the importance of exercises that require the lea...

This paper describes a method for learner modelling for use within simulation-based learning environments. The goal of the learner modelling system is to provide the learner with advice on discovery learning. The system analyzes the evidence that a learner has generated for a specific hypothesis, assesses whether the learner needs support on the discovery process, and the nature of that support...