Part-of-speech Sequences and Distribution in a Learner Corpus of English

Part-of-speech Sequences and Distribution in a Learner Corpus of English Rebecca H. Shih*, John Y. Chiang+ and F. Tien+ *Department of Foreign Languages and Literature +Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Sun Yat-sen University Page 171 ~ 177 Proceedings of Research on Computational Linguistics Conference XIII (ROCLING XIII) Taipei, Taiwan 2000-08-24/2000-08-25 171 Part-of-speech Sequences and Distribution in a Learner Corpus of English Rebecca H. Shih*, John Y. Chiang+ and F. Tien+ *Department of Foreign Languages and Literature +Department of Computer Science and Engineering National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung,Taiwan, R.O.C. E-mail: hsuehueh@mail.nsysu.edu.tw Abstract Computer learner corpora have been widely used by SLA/EFL specialists since mid 1990s to gain better insights into authentic learner language. The work presented in this paper examines the inter-language of Taiwanese learners of English from a part-of-speech sequence perspective. Two pre-tagged corpora (one learner corpus and one native corpus) are involved in this work. The experimental results indicate that there are more than one third of eligible POS trigrams that are never practiced by the Taiwanese learners in their writing and the learners have stronger preference than native speakers in using pronouns, especially right after punctuations, verbs and conjunctions. 1. Introduction With the recognition of its theoretical and practical potential, computer learner corpora (CLC) have been subsequently built up around the world since early 1990s.[1] CLC research aims to gain a better insight into learners’ inter-language from the authentic data. The research often involves comparisons between inter-language that learners possess and native language on various linguistic features. For instance, the frequency distributions of most commonly-used words in a native and seven eastern European learner corpora are compared on various parts-of-speech categories[2]; the use of complement clauses in terms of their frequencies in four learner corpora as contrasted with their native counterparts [3] is studied; the use of adverbial connectors by Swedish learners in comparison with the natives’ is examined [4]. The quantitative information as such often guides the researchers to carry out insightful qualitative analysis. And this kind of cross-language approach helps SLA and EFL specialists find out what linguistic features the language learners are apt to overuse/underuse, 172 what particular areas of language behavior that are shared by learners with different backgrounds, and to what extent these phenomena appear in learner English. The aim of the work in this paper is to discover distinctive inter-language features of Taiwanese learners of English in terms of part-of-speech sequences and distribution. It is based on two corpora: Taiwanese Learner corpus of English (TLCE) and British National Corpus (BNC). Both corpora are tagged by TOSCA tagger, using the TOSCA-ICLE tagset. The details of the corpora and the tagger will be stated subsequently in Section 2, which is followed by a series of experiments in Section 3. Conclusions are drawn in Section 4 with future work. 2. Methodology 2.1 Corpora: TLCE and BNC As stated in the introduction, CLC-research often compares non-native data with native data in order to reveal the overuse and/or underuse phenomena in a learner corpus. In …

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