[Corpora-List] corpora of grammatical errors

Tue Apr 17 12:56:46 UTC 2012

Dear Anabela
I'm glad you found what you wanted! :)

As often happens on corpora-list, initial postings often underspecify the datasets being sought...
so initial replies often request clarification.

Forgive me if I remain somewhat sceptical about many of the principles and techniques
used in detecting, categorising and correcting 'errors'. From my experience of encountering
and thinking about language 'errors' (my own as well as other people's):
#1 the 'locus of manifestation' of a marked usage is often not the 'trigger point'?
#2 the 'grammatical manifestation' may have semantic, phraseological, pragmatic, or discourse-level origins?
#3 the 'categorisation' and 'correction' of the 'error' may therefore not be appropriate?
#4 for pedagogy, correction is a weak tool; 'learning' is discouraged, 'autonomy' is reduced?
#5 'style' is an even more subtle area; automatic substitution of 'weak' verbs with 'strong'
verbs would create 'instruction-leaflet' style rather than professional style? 'Unnecessary words' is
a highly subjective category - it would be interesting to take some exemplars of 'good style'
(as evaluated by a reasonably large consensus), and see how many words in them are regarded
as 'unnecessary' by your system? A degree of redundancy is involved even in 'professional' style?

Best wishes
Ramesh

Ramesh Krishnamurthy
Visiting Academic Fellow, School of Languages and Social Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET

PS if you are interested in alternative approaches, please see
http://acorn.aston.ac.uk/acorn_publication.html > section D >
10. 08/02/11: Using Corpora for Autonomous Correction and Improvement of Academic Writing<http://acorn.aston.ac.uk/RK-publications/RK-EASG-Seminar080211-plus-demo.pdf>
as one starting point... :)

From: Anabela Barreiro [mailto:barreiro_anabela at hotmail.com]
Sent: 16 April 2012 11:34
To: Krishnamurthy, Ramesh
Cc: corpora at uib.no
Subject: RE: corpora of grammatical errors

Dear Corpora-List Members,

I would like to thank all who have sent me individual e-mails with suggestions, including indication on where to find corpora for languages other than English and the Romance languages.

In reply to Ramesh,

I would say that they all contain sentences with grammatical errors. I am interested in corpora where all sentences have errors on particular aspects of the grammar (prepositions, verb tenses, negation, coordination, etc., etc., etc.) with some pre-selection and pre-categorization of the ungrammaticality of the sentences. In the past, system developers used what was called "test suites", mostly fabricated by linguists for the specific purpose of testing a particular system. I am interested in sentences that come from "real" usage of language by non-native speakers, but also native speakers with writing difficulties or writing texts where language and style is not optimized or could be improved. When supporting editing of a text, existing grammar checkers are not sophisticated enough to identify all the grammar problems and often identify as a problem perfectly correct sentences (false positives and false negatives). In addition to correction, there is also the potential for providing better solutions for writing (including more categories to the typology)... For example, I can fix support verb constructions with "weak" verbs into semantically "strong" verbs, which gives the text a more professional style, eliminates words that are unecessary, helps texts being translated more efficiently by humans and machines, etc.

>>From my request on this list, I found out that there is an ongoing shared task concerned with the automated correction of errors in text by Robert Dale and Adam Kilgarriff :
http://clt.mq.edu.au/research/projects/hoo/

This is a especially interesting task because it groups errors into linguistic categories. Hoo already includes preposition and determiner errors in exam scripts authored by learners of English as a Second Language, but their goal is to enlarge the typology of linguistic errors. That's all I wished for :)

Thank you all,

Anabela
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Think GREEN - Act GREEN!

Anabela M. Barreiro
Personal webpage: https://www.l2f.inesc-id.pt/wiki/index.php/Anabela_Barreiro
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/anabelabarreiro
<http://www.linkedin.com/pub/3/219/A43>
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________________________________
From: r.krishnamurthy at aston.ac.uk<mailto:r.krishnamurthy at aston.ac.uk>
To: barreiro_anabela at hotmail.com<mailto:barreiro_anabela at hotmail.com>
CC: corpora at uib.no<mailto:corpora at uib.no>
Subject: corpora of grammatical errors
Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2012 12:42:20 +0000

Hi Anabela

#1 Do ALL the currently available public corpora not 'contain sentences with grammatical errors'?

Very few (if any) texts will be 100% grammatically 'correct' (whichever model of grammar you use)?

So BNC, COCA, etc should be OK for you?

But the specific 'errors' your system identifies will of course depend on your choice of model.

#2 If you want a corpus with a high proportion of 'errors', would any available LANGUAGE LEARNER,

NON-NATIVE-SPEAKER, NON-STANDARD, or VARIETAL corpus be sufficient for your purposes? These

corpora should be easy to find via Google, by specifying one of those attributes?

Hope this helps

Ramesh

Ramesh Krishnamurthy

Visiting Academic Fellow, School of Languages and Social Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET

Director, ACORN (Aston Corpus Network project): http://acorn.aston.ac.uk/

Corpus Analyst:

(a) GeWiss (Volkswagen Foundation) project: http://www1.aston.ac.uk/lss/research/research-projects/gewiss-spoken-academic-discourse/

(b) Discourse of Climate Change: http://www1.aston.ac.uk/lss/research/research-projects/discourse-of-climate-change-project/

(c) Feminism: http://acorn.aston.ac.uk/projects.html

(d) COMENEGO (Corpus Multilingüe de Economía y Negocios) - Multilingual Corpus of Business and Economics: http://dti.ua.es/comenego

(e) European Phraseology Project: http://labidiomas3.ua.es/phraseology/login/login.php

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Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2012 10:24:50 +0000

From: Anabela Barreiro <barreiro_anabela at hotmail.com<mailto:barreiro_anabela at hotmail.com>>

Subject: [Corpora-List] corpora of grammatical errors

To: "corpora at uib.no<mailto:corpora at uib.no>" <corpora at uib.no<mailto:corpora at uib.no>>

Dear Corpora List Members,

I am looking for public corpora containing sentences with grammatical errors.

I plan to use the corpora as input to grammar checking and correction routines.

The corpora can be in English or romance languages. I appreciate any indication of where I can find those corpora. Thank you!

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