[Corpora-List] Learner corpora build & query tool?

[simon smith]

I've been looking over the resources recommended to Mieke van der Velden on
the list with considerable interest.

Here at NCCU in Taiwan, we have 8 language departments -- English, French,
German, Korean, Japanese, Spanish, Arabic, Turkish -- and we plan to build a
learner corpus for each. Although this sounds like an ambitious scheme, it
has support and funding from the central university administration.

The people studying these languages, here in Taiwan, are native speakers of
Chinese. I'm aware of Chinese speaker learner corpora of some of the
languages: English obviously, Spanish and Japanese (and German planned) at
National Chengkung University. But I'm interested to know if any of our
planned corpora will be firsts. It seems pretty unlikely that there exists a
Chinese speaker LC of Turkish, for example. So if you are reading this, and
you know of an existing Chinese speaker LC of one of our languages, perhaps
you could let me know.

It's a longish-term project, and we're not too clear at the moment what sort
of interlanguage annotation or correction we'll be doing. Right now, the
important thing is to start collecting data. We could probably create our
own interface to do this, but I wonder if there is a (free or shareware)
product out there that we could use for LC building.

It would need to be pretty straightforward to use, because the language
teachers collaborating will have no experience of corpora or corpus
linguistics. Some of them will, indeed, have very little computer experience
at all.

Ideally, we would collect the data (as homework assignments) directly from
students. I'm wondering about the possibility of using Moodle for this,
either the Database or Wiki modules ( there is a Corpus module but it's not
supported any more). The students would input their data, and everyone would
be able to see it. In the Wiki, we could allow teachers to edit it, and a
record of changes would be kept.

But I'm not how easy it would be to do annotation of a "corpus" in that
format, or really analyse it in a conventional way. There would be no
obvious way of generating a concordance, for example.

I really like the idea of a shared resource which can be built, updated,
consulted and used by learners, all via the same interface.

Any thoughts anyone?

歡迎以中文回信

Simon Smith, PhD

Assistant Professor
Foreign Language Center
National Chengchi University

office: Research Building 416
phone:  (0)2 2939 3091  x 88015
fax  +44 (0)871 243 1512
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