The Uppsala Corpus of Student Writings: Corpus Creation, Annotation, and Analysis

The Uppsala Corpus of Student Writings Corpus Creation, Annotation, and Analysis Be´ata Megyesi1, Jesper N¨asman2, Anne Palm´er3 Department of Linguistics and Philology1,2, Department of Scandinavian Languages3 Uppsala University, Sweden beata.megyesi@lingfil.uu.se, jesper.nasman@lingfil.uu.se, anne.palmer@nordiska.uu.se Abstract The Uppsala Corpus of Student Writings consists of Swedish texts produced as part of a national test of students ranging in age from nine (in year three of primary school) to nineteen (the last year of upper secondary school) who are studying either Swedish or Swedish as a second language. National tests have been collected since 1996. The corpus currently consists of 2,500 texts containing over 1.5 million tokens. Parts of the texts have been annotated on several linguistic levels using existing state-of-the-art natural language processing tools. In order to make the corpus easy to interpret for scholars in the humanities, we chose the CoNLL format instead of an XML-based representation. Since spelling and grammatical errors are common in student writings, the texts are automatically corrected while keeping the original tokens in the corpus. Each token is annotated with part-of-speech and morphological features as well as syntactic structure. The main purpose of the corpus is to facilitate the systematic and quantitative empirical study of the writings of various student groups based on gender, geographic area, age, grade awarded or a combination of these, synchronically or diachronically. The intention is for this to be a monitor corpus, currently under development. Keywords: student writings, digital humanities, educational applications 1. Introduction Tools developed in computational linguistics for the auto- matic analysis of texts can be useful in many subject areas in the humanities and social sciences, enabling more con- sistent, large-scale quantitative linguistic analyses of var- ious kinds of texts. This new field of digital humanities may introduce new approaches to research in the different disciplines. However, many natural language processing tools cannot be used directly by scholars since they often require programming skills and some knowledge of compu- tational linguistics. Digital humanities can help researchers in the humanities take advantage of the resources and tools available in language technology without requiring them to have the technical expertise normally associated with these kinds of tools. This paper describes such an effort, a col- laboration between scholars in the Swedish language and computational linguists to perform a quantitative analysis of Swedish student writings over time based on automatic linguistic analysis. The resource we present is unique not only to Swedish scholars examining student writings and their development over time, but also to the entire aca- demic community since the set-up can generally be applied to other languages. The Research Group for National Tests in Swedish and Swedish as a Second Language at Uppsala University de- signs national tests for students in elementary school years 3, 6, 9 and in upper secondary school on behalf of the Swedish National Agency for Education. These tests are mandatory and are aimed at providing equivalent and fair grades to every student1. The research group regularly re- ceives a subset of the completed tests in order …

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