Universal Dependencies for Learner English
Abstract
We introduce the Treebank of Learner English (TLE), the first publicly available syntactic treebank for English as a Second Language (ESL). The TLE provides manually annotated POS tags and Universal Dependency (UD) trees for 5,124 sentences from the Cambridge First Certificate in English (FCE) corpus. The UD annotations are tied to a pre-existing error annotation of the FCE, whereby full syntactic analyses are provided for both the original and error corrected versions of each sentence. Further on, we delineate ESL annotation guidelines that allow for consistent syntactic treatment of ungrammatical English. Finally, we benchmark POS tagging and dependency parsing performance on the TLE dataset and measure the effect of grammatical errors on parsing accuracy. We envision the treebank to support a wide range of linguistic and computational research on second language acquisition as well as automatic processing of ungrammatical language. The treebank is available at universaldependencies.org. The annotation manual used in this project and a graphical query engine are available at esltreebank.org.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1605.04278,
title = {Universal Dependencies for Learner English},
author = {Yevgeni Berzak and Jessica Kenney and Carolyn Spadine and Jing Xian Wang and Lucia Lam and Keiko Sophie Mori and Sebastian Garza and Boris Katz},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1605.04278},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
Updated parsing experiments to EWT v1.3, improved grammatical error marking, minor revisions. To appear in ACL 2016