Review of Practices of Collecting and Annotating Texts in the Learner Corpus REALEC

Olga Vinogradova, Olga Lyashevskaya

Abstract: REALEC, learner corpus released in the open access, had received 6,054 essays written in English by HSE undergraduate students in their English university-level examination by the year 2020. This paper reports on the data collection and manual annotation approaches for the texts of 2014–2019 and discusses the computer tools available for working with the corpus. This provides the basis for the ongoing development of automated annotation for the new portions of learner texts in the corpus. The observations in the first part were made on the reliability of the total of 134,608 error tags manually annotated across the texts in the corpus. Some examples are given in the paper to emphasize the role of the interference with learners’ L1 (Russian), one more direction of the future corpus research. A number of studies carried out by the research team working on the basis of the REALEC data are listed as examples of the research potential that the corpus has been providing.