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The ALeSKo learner corpus

Design – annotation – quantitative analyses
  • Heike Zinsmeister and Margit Breckle
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Multilingual Corpora and Multilingual Corpus Analysis
This chapter is in the book Multilingual Corpora and Multilingual Corpus Analysis

Abstract

The ALesKo learner corpus is a small-scale comparable corpus consisting of two subcorpora: annotated essays by advanced Chinese learners of German and comparable essays by German native speakers. The motivation for its compilation was the investigation of discourse-related phenomena such as local coherence in second-language acquisition of German. After introducing how the texts were compiled and annotated, the article focuses on quantitative studies at the token level. We discuss problems of tokenisation and part-of-speech tagging and compare the inventory of the two subcorpora in terms of frequently used N-grams and lexical richness, among other aspects. We conclude the article by describing possible applications of the study in foreign language acquisition research and language teaching.

Abstract

The ALesKo learner corpus is a small-scale comparable corpus consisting of two subcorpora: annotated essays by advanced Chinese learners of German and comparable essays by German native speakers. The motivation for its compilation was the investigation of discourse-related phenomena such as local coherence in second-language acquisition of German. After introducing how the texts were compiled and annotated, the article focuses on quantitative studies at the token level. We discuss problems of tokenisation and part-of-speech tagging and compare the inventory of the two subcorpora in terms of frequently used N-grams and lexical richness, among other aspects. We conclude the article by describing possible applications of the study in foreign language acquisition research and language teaching.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Introduction xi
  4. Section 1. Learner and attrition corpora
  5. The LeaP corpus 3
  6. Technological and methodological challenges in creating, annotating and sharing a learner corpus of spoken German 25
  7. Creation and analysis of a reading comprehension exercise corpus 47
  8. The ALeSKo learner corpus 71
  9. Corpora of spoken Spanish by simultaneous and successive German-Spanish bilingual and Spanish monolingual children 97
  10. Monolingual and bilingual phonoprosodic corpora of child German and child Spanish 107
  11. Pragmatic corpus analysis, exemplified by Turkish-German bilingual and monolingual data 123
  12. Corpus of Polish spoken in Germany 153
  13. The HABLA-corpus (German-French and German-Italian) 163
  14. Section 2. Language contact corpora
  15. The Hamburg Corpus of Argentinean Spanish (HaCASpa) 183
  16. Ad hoc contact phenomena or established features of a contact variety? 199
  17. Phonoprosodic corpus of spoken Catalan (PhonCAT) 215
  18. Researching the intelligibility of a (German) dialect 231
  19. Annotating ambiguity 245
  20. Section 3. Interpreting corpora
  21. Sharing community interpreting corpora 275
  22. CoSi – A Corpus of Consecutive and Simultaneous Interpreting 295
  23. The corpus “Interpreting in Hospitals” 305
  24. Section 4. Comparable and parallel corpora
  25. The GeWiss corpus 319
  26. Korpus C4 339
  27. Treebanks in translation studies 347
  28. Section 5. Corpus tools
  29. Multilingual phonological corpus analysis 365
  30. Finding the balance between strict defaults and total openness 383
  31. General index 401
  32. Corpora index 405
  33. Language index 407
https://doi.org/10.1075/hsm.14.06zin

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Introduction xi
  4. Section 1. Learner and attrition corpora
  5. The LeaP corpus 3
  6. Technological and methodological challenges in creating, annotating and sharing a learner corpus of spoken German 25
  7. Creation and analysis of a reading comprehension exercise corpus 47
  8. The ALeSKo learner corpus 71
  9. Corpora of spoken Spanish by simultaneous and successive German-Spanish bilingual and Spanish monolingual children 97
  10. Monolingual and bilingual phonoprosodic corpora of child German and child Spanish 107
  11. Pragmatic corpus analysis, exemplified by Turkish-German bilingual and monolingual data 123
  12. Corpus of Polish spoken in Germany 153
  13. The HABLA-corpus (German-French and German-Italian) 163
  14. Section 2. Language contact corpora
  15. The Hamburg Corpus of Argentinean Spanish (HaCASpa) 183
  16. Ad hoc contact phenomena or established features of a contact variety? 199
  17. Phonoprosodic corpus of spoken Catalan (PhonCAT) 215
  18. Researching the intelligibility of a (German) dialect 231
  19. Annotating ambiguity 245
  20. Section 3. Interpreting corpora
  21. Sharing community interpreting corpora 275
  22. CoSi – A Corpus of Consecutive and Simultaneous Interpreting 295
  23. The corpus “Interpreting in Hospitals” 305
  24. Section 4. Comparable and parallel corpora
  25. The GeWiss corpus 319
  26. Korpus C4 339
  27. Treebanks in translation studies 347
  28. Section 5. Corpus tools
  29. Multilingual phonological corpus analysis 365
  30. Finding the balance between strict defaults and total openness 383
  31. General index 401
  32. Corpora index 405
  33. Language index 407
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