The Cambridge Learner Corpus, English Profile, the Sketch Engine and the Kelly Project Adam...

The Cambridge Learner Corpus, English Profile, the Sketch Engine

and the Kelly Project

Adam KilgarriffLexical Computing Ltd

http://www.sketchengine.co.uk

The Cambridge Learner Corpus, English Profile, the Sketch Engine,

“freely available”, HOO, DANTE and the Kelly Project

Adam KilgarriffLexical Computing Ltd

http://www.sketchengine.co.uk

Cambridge Learner Corpus (CLC)

• Since 1993 – Nearly as old as CECL

• Leading resource (like ICLE)• CUP and Cambridge ESOL– For better dictionaries, ELT courses, tests– Material: all from exams (levels A1-C2)

• 45m words; 22m error-tagged• 200,000 scripts, 138 L1s, 203 nationalities

English Profile

• From 2006• Cambridge Univ, Univ Press, ESOL (+ others)• Goal– for each CEFR level, find characteristic lexis and

grammar– Main resource: CLC– Talk on Thursday• Theodora Alexopolou, Helen Yannakoudakis

Flyers

Sketch Engine

• Leading corpus tool• Word sketches– One-page summaries of a word’s grammatical and

collocational behaviour• In use at OUP, CUP, Collins, Macmillan, INL …• 42 languages– Over 150 corpora– Since May including CHILDES: demo– Since last year including CLC

Error-coded corpus

• Challenge– Intuitive to search for x• anywhere• only where it is part of an error• only where it is part of a correction

where x can be a word, phrase, grammar pattern …

Requirement for CLC in Sketch Engine

Sample text

• We will only use those informations to take part of our guest survey

Error-coded corpora in SkE

• demo

freely available

freely available

Free (MED online)Sense 1: not costing anythingSense 4: not limited by rules … anyone can get hold of it??

freely available

Free (MED online)Sense 1: not costing anythingSense 4: not limited by rules … anyone can get hold of it??

AvailableTo download onto your comTo use

Case studiesICLE CLC

Money 225 EUR No

To everyone Yes Cambridge author/collab

To download ? No

To use Yes Yes

Non-geeks

• Access is important, not download• Web is beautiful

HOO / HOO+

• Helping Our Own• HOO: English-NNS NLP researchers – Developer = user: motivation– Shared task/competitive evaluation• Organisers define task and prepare ‘gold standard’• Teams participate by running their software over test

data• Six teams (incl Tübingen), workshop end Sept

HOO+ (2012)

• Probably– English: learner data from CLC– Other languages? – Tasks• Essay scoring • Determiner, preposition errors• ?• http://www.clt.mq.edu.au/research/projects/hoo/

DANTE

Highlights of English lexicography

DANTE

DANTE

DANTE

DANTE

http://webdante.comFlyers

The KELLY Project

• EU Lifelong Learning Project• Word cards– 9 languages

• Arabic Chinese English Greek Italian Norwegian Polish Russian Swedish

– All 36 pairs– Words the learner should know (at A1 … C2)

• Partners• Stockholm Univ, Gotheburg Univ, Adam Mickiewicz Univ,

ILSP Athens, CNR Pisa, Oslo Univ, Leeds Univ, Keewords A/S, Lexical Computing Ltd

Interesting question

• How close to purely corpus-based can a pedagogic list be?

Method

• Take a general corpus• Count• Review, add, delete using other lists and corpora• Translate (72 directed-lg-pairs)• Words not in source list which occur in

translations:– Review source list

• http://kelly.sketchengine.co.uk

• Symmatrical pairs: <x,y> and <y,x>• Cliques:– For x, y, z, … all pairs are symmetrical– 9-language cliques (English members)• hospital library music sun theory

Homage