Niels Ott, Ramon Ziai, and Detmar Meurers
In Thomas Schmidt and Kai Wörner (eds.) Multilingual Corpora and Multilingual Corpus Analysis. Hamburg Studies in Multilingualism (HSM). Benjamins. 47-69.
We discuss the collection and analysis of a cross-sectional and longitudinal learner corpus consisting of answers to reading comprehension questions written by adult second language learners of German. We motivate the need for such task-based learner corpora and identify the properties which make reading comprehension exercises a particularly interesting task.
In terms of the creation of the corpus, we introduce the web-based WELCOME tool we developed to support the decentralized data collection and annotation of the richly structured corpus in real-life language teaching programs. On the analysis side, we investigate the binary and the complex content-assessment classification scheme used by the annotators and the inter-annotator agreement obtained for the current corpus snapshot, at the halfway point of our four-year effort. We present results showing that for such task-based corpora, meaning assessment can be performed with reasonable agreement and we discuss several sources of disagreement.
Electronically available:
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Note: The electronic versions of the publications linked on this page are the last versions I had the copyright for. Where a publisher copyedited and/or typeset the papers, the electronic copies linked here are NOT identical to the officially published version, which should be used for any quotes, references to page numbers, etc.
Bibtex entry:
@InCollection{Ott.Ziai.Meurers-12,
author = {Ott, Niels and Ziai, Ramon and Meurers, Detmar},
title = {Creation and Analysis of a Reading Comprehension
Exercise Corpus: Towards Evaluating Meaning in Context},
editor = {Thomas Schmidt and Kai Wörner},
booktitle = {Multilingual Corpora and Multilingual Corpus Analysis},
series = {Hamburg Studies in Multilingualism (HSM)},
year = {2012},
pages = {47--69},
address = {Amsterdam},
publisher = {Benjamins},
url = {http://purl.org/dm/papers/ott-ziai-meurers-12.html}
}