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Article published In:
International Journal of Learner Corpus Research
Vol. 6:2 (2020) ► pp.220–236
Corpus Report

Refining and modifying the EFCAMDAT

Lessons from creating a new corpus from an existing large-scale English learner language database

| University of Cambridge

This report outlines the development of a new corpus, which was created by refining and modifying the largest open-access L2 English learner database – the EFCAMDAT. The extensive data-curation process, which can inform the development and use of other corpora, included procedures such as converting the database from XML to a tabular format, and removing problematic markup tags and non-English texts. The final dataset contains two corresponding samples, written by similar learners in response to different prompts, which represents a unique research opportunity when it comes to analyzing task effects and conducting replication studies. Overall, the resulting corpus contains ~406,000 texts in the first sample and ~317,000 texts in the second sample, written by learners representing diverse L1s and a large range of L2 proficiency levels.

Keywords: data curation, corpus cleaning, English as a second language, EFCAMDAT
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Preparing the new corpus
    • 2.1Selecting the sample
    • 2.2Format: Converting from XML to a tabular format
    • 2.3Content: Analyzing and removing texts
      • 2.3.1Texts with problematic markup tags
      • 2.3.2Ultra-short texts
      • 2.3.3Non-English texts
      • 2.3.4Duplicate texts
      • 2.3.5Outlier texts based on wordcount
    • 2.4Structure: Classifying texts based on prompt
  • 3.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 10 December 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijlcr.20009.sha
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