The making of the Litkey Corpus, a richly annotated longitudinal corpus of German texts written by primary school children

Ronja Laarmann-Quante, Stefanie Dipper, Eva Belke


Abstract
To date, corpus and computational linguistic work on written language acquisition has mostly dealt with second language learners who have usually already mastered orthography acquisition in their first language. In this paper, we present the Litkey Corpus, a richly-annotated longitudinal corpus of written texts produced by primary school children in Germany from grades 2 to 4. The paper focuses on the (semi-)automatic annotation procedure at various linguistic levels, which include POS tags, features of the word-internal structure (phonemes, syllables, morphemes) and key orthographic features of the target words as well as a categorization of spelling errors. Comprehensive evaluations show that high accuracy was achieved on all levels, making the Litkey Corpus a useful resource for corpus-based research on literacy acquisition of German primary school children and for developing NLP tools for educational purposes. The corpus is freely available under https://www.linguistics.rub.de/litkeycorpus/.
Anthology ID:
W19-4006
Volume:
Proceedings of the 13th Linguistic Annotation Workshop
Month:
August
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Annemarie Friedrich, Deniz Zeyrek, Jet Hoek
Venue:
LAW
SIG:
SIGANN
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
43–55
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-4006
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-4006
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ronja Laarmann-Quante, Stefanie Dipper, and Eva Belke. 2019. The making of the Litkey Corpus, a richly annotated longitudinal corpus of German texts written by primary school children. In Proceedings of the 13th Linguistic Annotation Workshop, pages 43–55, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The making of the Litkey Corpus, a richly annotated longitudinal corpus of German texts written by primary school children (Laarmann-Quante et al., LAW 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-4006.pdf