CItA: un Corpus di Produzioni Scritte di Apprendenti l'Italiano L1 Annotato con Errori
Authors: Alessia Barbagli, Pietro Lucisano, Felice Dell'Orletta, Simonetta Montemagni, Giulia Venturi (Sapienza Università di Roma, CNR-ILC, 2015)
Topic: Learner Corpora and Language Acquisition

Abstract
In this article we present CITA the first corpus of written productions of Litalian L1 learners of the first and second year of the first grade secondary school noted with grammatical, spelling and lexical errors. The specificities of the corpus and its diachronistic nature make it particularly useful both for linguistic-computational applications and for socio-pedagogical studies.

Introduction
The construction of a body of learning productions has always been at the heart of the research activities of the computational linguistic community. Particular attention is paid to the annotation and classification of the mistakes made by learners. Corporate noted with this type of information are typically used for the study and creation of models for the development of writing skills (Deane and Quinlan, 2010) and for the development of systems to support teaching (the so-called Intelligent Computers) (Granger, 2003). In this scenario, a particular interest is dedicated to the collection and annotation of the body of productions of L2 learners employed as a starting point for studies on the development of the interlanguage, for reflection activities on the possible modification and/or customization of the teaching action of the teacher and for the development of systems of automatic correction of errors. Most of the activities concerned the construction of a L2 learning corps, among which the most recent and the largest is the NUS Corpus of Learner English (NUCLE) (Dahlmeier et al., 2013), used as a reference resource in 2013 and 2014 of the "Shared Task on Grammatical Error Correction" (Ng et al., 2013; Ng et al., 2014). However, in recent years, the attention has also been directed to L2 other than English, such as the Arabic (Zaghouani et al., 2015), the German (Ludeling et al., 2005), the Hungarian (Dickinson and Ledbetter, 2012), the Basque (Aldabe et al., 2005) and the Czech and Italian (Andorno and Rastelli, 2009; Boyd et al., 2014). Less attention has been paid to the construction of resources consisting of L1 learning productions. An exception is represented by the KoKo corpus (Abel et al., 2014), collection of productions of German learners L1 of the last year of the second grade secondary school enriched with background information of the learners (e.g. age, gender, socio-economic situation), manual recording of spelling and grammatical errors, and linguistic information recorded automatically. By placing ourselves in this last scenario, in this article we present CITA (Corpus Italiano di Apprenti L1) the first corpus of written productions of Litaliano L1 learners recorded manually with different types of errors and with its correction. The corpus, composed of productions of the first two years of the first grade secondary school, is to our knowledge not only the first Italian corpus of this type but contains characteristics of novelties that make it unique even within the international panorama of research.

Conclusion
CitA can also be used in socio-pedagogic studies, allowing the distribution of errors to be related to the background variables. It is thus possible to verify the extent to which changes in writing are attributable to background socio-economic conditions. For example, it is interesting to note how the statistical surveys conducted have revealed that the decrease in the incorrect use of vocabulary from the first to the second year is significantly related to the habit of reading. Or you can study how grammatical errors vary statistically significantly compared to the placement of the school in the center or outskirts of Rome: while in the center schools the errors decrease in the transition from the first to the second year, in two of the four schools on the outskirts increase. Different is the case of spelling errors that do not vary statistically significantly from the background variables considered. This would confirm some studies (Colombo, 2011; Ferreri, 1971; Lavino, 1975; De Mauro, 1977) where it is stated that spelling correctness is a skill that is acquired over time because it requires the sedimentation of norms, often arbitrary, that establish not causal bonds between sound and graphics.