We introduce the Treebank of Learner English (TLE), the first publicly available syntactic treebank for English as a Second Language (ESL). The TLE provides manually annotated POS tags and Universal Dependency (UD) trees for 5,124 sentences from the Cambridge First Certificate in English (FCE) corpus. The UD annotations are tied to a pre-existing error annotation of the FCE, whereby full syntactic analyses are provided for both the original and error corrected versions of each sentence. Further on, we delineate ESL annotation guidelines that allow for consistent syntactic treatment of ungrammatical English. Finally, we benchmark POS tagging and dependency parsing performance on the TLE dataset and measure the effect of grammatical errors on parsing accuracy. We envision the treebank to support a wide range of linguistic and computational research on second language acquisition as well as automatic processing of ungrammatical language 1 .
A part of this corpus has been manually annotated with POS-tags and dependency structures, and was recently released as the Treebank of Learner English REF .
Universal Dependencies for Learner English
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