L1-L2 Parallel Treebank of Learner Chinese: Overused and Underused Syntactic Structures

We present a preliminary analysis on a corpus of texts written by learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL), annotated in the form of an L1-L2 parallel dependency treebank. The treebank consists of parse trees of sentences written by CFL learners (“L2 sentences”), parse trees of their target hypotheses (“L1 sentences”), and word alignment between the L1 sentences and L2 sentences. Currently, the treebank consists of 600 L2 sentences and 697 L1 sentences. We report the most overused and underused syntactic relations by the CFL learners, and discuss the underlying learner errors.

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