Error Corpora for Different Informant Groups:Annotating and Analyzing Texts from L 2 Speakers, People with Dyslexia and Children (2022)

Abstract: Error corpora are useful for many tasks, in particular for developing spell and grammar checking software and teaching material and tools. We present and compare three specialized Icelandic error corpora; the Icelandic L2 Error Corpus, the Icelandic Dyslexia Error Corpus, and the Icelandic Child Language Error Corpus. Each corpus contains texts written by speakers of a particular group; L2 speakers of Icelandic, people with dyslexia, and children aged 10 to 15. The corpora shed light on errors made by these groups and their frequencies, and all errors are manually labeled according to an annotation scheme. The corpora vary in size, consisting of errors ranging from 7,817 to 24,948, and are published under a CC BY 4.0 license. In this paper, we describe the corpora and their annotation scheme, and draw comparisons between their errors and their frequencies.

## introduction error analysis is a crucial part of corpus linguistics and applied linguistics as it provides an insight into language use and the needs of speaker groups within a language. it thereby facilitates the development of a variety of practical tools to aid these needs, such as more focused teaching and learning materials, and software tools like spelling and grammar checkers. to contribute to this field, we present three icelandic error corpora, each focusing on different speaker populations; second language users of icelandic (hereinafter: l2 icelandic), children at the age of 10 to 15, and people with dyslexia. thus, we have created three manually annotated error corpora of different sizes, one for each respective informant group, and extracted statistical data on the errors that occur. these corpora are an invaluable source for further research in icelandic for both academic and practical purposes. all corpora are published under a cc by 4.0 license. @xcite the paper is structured as follows. section 2 discusses the creation of error corpora in general. section 3 describes the specialized error corpora, their annotation and the three respective corpora. section 4 draws comparisons between the errors in the three specialized corpora and compares them to errors in a previous general error corpus. section 5 discusses possible future use of the corpora and finally, we conclude with section 6. ## creating error corpora error analysis has been an integrated part of applied linguistics and computational linguistics for decades, and corpus linguistics in general has developed as a key methodology in the humanities and social sciences @xcite . it provides key insight into both the errors that adult native speakers of a language produce in writing, as well as those of language learners, children, and people with different learning difficulties such as dyslexia. gathering data on these errors has become a standard practice for many languages and is invaluable for creating different software tools for language correction and suggestion, such as spell checkers, grammar assistance, and lexical and stylistic suggestions. furthermore, an error corpus gives way to contrastive analysis which leads to better understanding of language use in different groups and the creation of both digital and analogue content that would facilitate them (e.g. improving teaching materials for second language learners and children). the icelandic error corpus was created for this purpose, and was the first icelandic error corpus @xcite . it has already been used for developing an icelandic open-source spell and grammar checker @xcite , wherein the labeled errors in the corpus are used to measure the spell and grammar checker's improvements. this error corpus consists of texts written by icelandic native-speaking adults with no known learn-ing disabilities, and provides information on errors which this speaker group is likely to make. however, the icelandic population consists of various speakers who might make errors different to a general speaker. for this purpose, error corpora for particular speaker groups are important. analyzing errors made by these groups enables the development of spell and grammar checkers and practical tools suited for those groups, as well as facilitating effective teaching methods and materials. ## the icelandic specialized error corpora three icelandic error corpora were created between the fall of 2019 and the fall of 2022, reflecting three different user groups; the icelandic l2 error corpus, the icelandic dyslexia error corpus, and the icelandic child language error corpus. all corpora are published under a cc by 4.0 license in the icelandic clarin repository @xcite . an older version of the icelandic l2 error corpus was described in @xcite . ## error analysis the error corpora for icelandic are of varying size (see to wording. the l2 error corpus is the only corpus with grammatical errors as the most common ones, i.e. 'inflection' and 'agreement', which reflects the fact that the authors' native language is not icelandic. inflectional errors include errors where a word is in the wrong case, e.g. when a subject of a sentence should be in the nominative case but is instead in the dative case. agreement errors include e.g. when a finite verb is not in agreement with a noun phrase, e.g. when it comes to number. as mentioned in section 3.3, among the most common errors in the dyslexia corpus is 'typo', which is in accordance with what is to be expected of dyslexic writers. this error is two times more frequent in the dyslexia corpus as compared to the general corpus, and is not among the 5 most common errors in children's text. typos are e.g. errors where a letter within a word is incorrectly replaced by a different letter, or a letter is missing within a word. as mentioned in section 3.4, the children's corpus shows more frequent capitalization errors than in the other corpora, but it is also the only corpus to have an error relating to vocabulary, 'insertion', among the 5 most common errors. insertion errors are e.g. errors where a redundant conjunction or word appears. certain error codes only occur in certain corpora. this is illustrated in