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Article published In:
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 23:1 (2018) ► pp.28–54

Dependency parsing of learner English

| University of Cambridge
| University of Tübingen
| University of Cambridge
| University of Cambridge

Current syntactic annotation of large-scale learner corpora mainly resorts to “standard parsers” trained on native language data. Understanding how these parsers perform on learner data is important for downstream research and application related to learner language. This study evaluates the performance of multiple standard probabilistic parsers on learner English. Our contributions are three-fold. Firstly, we demonstrate that the common practice of constructing a gold standard – by manually correcting the pre-annotation of a single parser – can introduce bias to parser evaluation. We propose an alternative annotation method which can control for the annotation bias. Secondly, we quantify the influence of learner errors on parsing errors, and identify the learner errors that impact on parsing most. Finally, we compare the performance of the parsers on learner English and native English. Our results have useful implications on how to select a standard parser for learner English.

Keywords: dependency parsing, learner English, annotation bias, parsing accuracy, learner error
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Automatic dependency annotation of learner language
  • 3.Data
  • 4.Method
    • 4.1Parser evaluation on learner English
      • 4.1.1Dependency scheme
      • 4.1.2Parsers
      • 4.1.3Annotators
      • 4.1.4Annotating procedure
    • 4.2Investigating the impact of learner errors on parsing
      • 4.2.1Learner error scheme
      • 4.2.2Annotating learner errors
      • 4.2.3Annotating the relation between learner errors and parsing errors
    • 4.3Comparison of dependency parsing on learner English and native English
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Annotation bias on learner English
      • 5.1.1Annotation errors on POS tags
      • 5.1.2Annotation errors on head indices
      • 5.1.3Annotation errors on dependency labels
    • 5.2Impact of learner errors on parsing errors
    • 5.3Parser performance on learner English and native English
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 31 May 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.16080.hua
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