We present the Hebrew Essay Corpus: an annotated corpus of Hebrew language argumentative essays authored by prospective higher-education students. The corpus includes both essays by native speakers, written as part of the psychometric exam that is used to assess their future success in academic studies; and essays authored by non-native speakers, with three different native languages, that were written as part of a language aptitude test. The corpus is uniformly encoded and stored. The non-native essays were annotated with target hypotheses whose main goal is to make the texts amenable to automatic processing (morphological and syntactic analysis). The corpus is available for academic purposes upon request. We describe the corpus and the error correction and annotation schemes used in its analysis. In addition to introducing this new resource, we discuss the challenges of identifying and analyzing non-native language use in general, and propose various ways for dealing with these challenges.

This paper describes a set of tools that offers comprehensive solutions for corpus lexicography. The tools perform a range of tasks, including construction of corpus lexicon, integrating information from external dictionaries, internal analysis of the lexicon, and lexical analysis of the corpus. The set of tools is particularly useful for creating dictionaries for under-resourced languages. The tools are integrated in a general-purpose software that includes additional tools for various research tasks, such as linguistic development analysis. Equipped with a user-friendly interface, the described system can be easily incorporated in research in a variety of fields.

This paper describes an automatic text-to-phonetics conversion system. The system was constructed to primarily serve as a research tool. It is implemented in a general-purpose linguistic software, which allows it to be incorporated in a multifaceted linguistic research in essentially any language. The system currently relies on two mechanisms to generate phonetic transcriptions from texts: (i) importing ready-made phonetic word forms from external dictionaries, and (ii) automatic generation of phonetic word forms based on a set of deterministic linguistic rules. The current paper describes the proposed system and its potential application to linguistic research.