A Language Resource of German Errors Written by Children with Dyslexia

A Language Resource of German Errors Written by Children with Dyslexia Maria Rauschenberger 1, Luz Rello 2, Silke F¨uchsel3, J¨org Thomaschewski3 1 Web Research Group, Universitat Pompeu Fabra 2Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University 3University of Applied Science Emden/Leer Maria.Rauschenberger@upf.edu, luzrello@cs.cmu.edu, sfuechsel@gmx.de, joerg.thomaschewski@hs-emden-leer.de Abstract In this paper we present a language resource for German, composed of a list of 1,021 unique errors extracted from a collection of texts written by people with dyslexia. The errors were annotated with a set of linguistic characteristics as well as visual and phonetic features. We present the compilation and the annotation criteria for the different types of dyslexic errors. This language resource has many potential uses since errors written by people with dyslexia reflect their difficulties. For instance, it has already been used to design language exercises to treat dyslexia in German. To the best of our knowledge, this is first resource of this kind in German. Keywords: Written Errors, Errors, Dyslexia, Visual, Phonetics, Resource, German 1. Introduction Dyslexia is a specific learning disability with neurologi- cal origin. It is characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and de- coding abilities. These difficulties typically result from a deficit in the perception of visual and auditory components of language. General misspells have already proven to be a useful source of knowledge for various applications (Gelman and Bar- letta, 2008; Piskorski et al., 2008; Baeza-Yates and Rello, 2012). A list of annotated errors of children with dyslexia in German is a useful resource because the errors that people with dyslexia make reflect the types of difficulties that they have (Sterling et al., 1998). As a matter of fact, these type of written errors have been used for various purposes such as studying dyslexia (Arag´on and Silva, 2000; Connelly et al., 2006), diagnosing dyslexia (Schulte-K¨orne et al., 1996; Toro and Cervera, 1984), for build tools to treat1 and to create applications to support dyslexia, such as dyslexia screeners (Rello et al., 2016b), spellcheckers (Korhonen, 2008; Pedler, 2007; Rello et al., 2015), text prediction soft- ware2 or spelling exercises (Rauschenberger et al., 2015; Rello et al., 2014b). There are similar errors resources for English (Pedler, 2007) and Spanish (Rello et al., 2014a; Rello et al., 2016a) but, to the best of our knowledge, this is first resource of this kind in German. There are similar errors resources for English (Pedler, 2007) and Spanish (Rello et al., 2014a; Rello et al., 2016a) but, to the best of our knowledge, this is first resource of this kind in German. In this paper, we present the creation of a new resource composed of German errors written by people with dyslexia that did not exist before. This involved the collection and the annotation of the errors with different kind of infor- mation, such as, phonological and visual information; and the creation of new categories specifically for German lan- 1Dyseggxia is available at https://itunes.apple. com/de/app/dyseggxia/id534986729?mt=8. 2Penfriend XL is available at http://www.penfriend. biz/. guage. The annotation criteria had …

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