Second language (L2) learner corpora are collections of language samples that demonstrate learners’ abilities to perform some learning tasks, e.g. an ability to write essays, answer to reading comprehension questions, or talk on a given topic. Such corpora are necessary for both empirical-based research within Second Language Acquisition (SLA), and for development of methods for automatic processing of such data. L2 corpora are notoriously difficult to collect, and their value depends to a greater degree on the representativeness and balance of the sampled data, type of associated metadata and reliability of manual annotations. In this chapter we thoroughly describe the SweLL-gold corpus of L2 Swedish, its annotation, statistics and metadata, and showcase main types of its use, such as (1) in research on SLA through detailed instructions on how to perform corpus searches given SweLL-specific annotation, combined with guidelines for SVALA usage, a tool for correction annotation; and (2) in NLP research on problems such as grammatical error correction through guidelines on how to use the different available file formats that the SweLL-gold corpus is released in. Both cases are further supported by case studies and, where available, relevant scripts ready for reuse by researchers.

We present a new set of 96 Swedish multi-word expressions annotated with degree of (non-)compositionality. In contrast to most previous compositionality datasets we also consider syntactically complex constructions and publish a formal specification of each expression. This allows evaluation of computational models beyond word bigrams, which have so far been the norm. Finally, we use the annotations to evaluate a system for automatic compositionality estimation based on distributional semantics. Our analysis of the disagreements between human annotators and the distributional model reveal interesting questions related to the perception of compositionality, and should be informative to future work in the area.

Analysis of narrative structure can be said to answer the question “Who tells what, and how?”. The first part of the question thus concerns aspects such as who is narrating, whether it is a character in the story or not, and if it is a first-person or third-person narrator. The second part is related to the story and its basic elements: characters and events, and how the sequence of events forms a plot. The third part concerns how the narrative text is constructed: ordering of the events, the perspective from which the story is seen, how much information the narrator has access to, etc.

This paper presents a supervised method for a novel task, namely, detecting elements of narration in passages of dialogue in prose fiction. The method achieves an F1-score of 80.8%, exceeding the best baseline by almost 33 percentage points. The purpose of the method is to enable a more fine-grained analysis of fictional dialogue than has previously been possible, and to provide a component for the further analysis of narrative structure in general.

This Special Issue contains three papers that are extended versions of abstracts presented at the Seventh Swedish Language Technology Conference (SLTC 2018), held at Stockholm University 8–9 November 2018.1 SLTC 2018 received 34 submissions, of which 31 were accepted for presentation. The number of registered participants was 113, including both attendees at SLTC 2018 and two co-located workshops that took place on 7 November. 32 participants were internationally affiliated, of which 14 were from outside the Nordic countries. Overall participation was thus on a par with previous editions of SLTC, but international participation was higher.

Annotation of second-language learner text is a cumbersome manual task which in turn requires interpretation to postulate the intended meaning of the learner’s language. This paper describes SVALA, a tool which separates the logical steps in this process while providing rich visual support for each of them. The first step is to pseudonymize the learner text to fulfil the legal and ethical requirements for a distributable learner corpus. The second step is to correct the text, which is carried out in the simplest possible way by text editing. During the editing, SVALA automatically maintains a parallel corpus with alignments between words in the learner source text and corrected text, while the annotator may repair inconsistent word alignments. Finally, the actual labelling of the corrections (the postulated errors) is performed. We describe the objectives, design and workflow of SVALA, and our plans for further development.

The article presents a new language learner corpus for Swedish, SweLL, and the methodology from collection and pesudonymisation to protect personal information of learners to annotation adapted to second language learning. The main aim is to deliver a well-annotated corpus of essays written by second language learners of Swedish and make it available for research through a browsable environment. To that end, a new annotation tool and a new project management tool have been implemented, both with the main purpose to ensure reliability and quality of the final corpus. In the article we discuss reasoning behind metadata selection, principles of gold corpus compilation and argue for separation of normalization from correction annotation.

Error coding of second-language learner text, that is, detecting, correcting and annotating errors, is a cumbersome task which in turn requires interpretation of the text to decide what the errors are. This paper describes a system with which the annotator corrects the learner text by editing it prior to the actual error annotation. During the editing, the system automatically generates a parallel corpus of the learner and corrected texts. Based on this, the work of the annotator consists of three independent tasks that are otherwise often conflated in error coding: correcting the learner text, repairing inconsistent alignments, and performing the actual error annotation.