Annotating spelling errors in German texts produced by primary school children

Abstract

We present a new multi-layered annotation scheme for orthographic errors in freely written German texts produced by primary school children. The scheme is closely linked to the German graphematic system and defines categories for both general structural word properties and error-related properties. Furthermore, it features multiple layers of information which can be used to evaluate an error. The categories can also be used to investigate properties of correctly-spelled words, and to compare them to the erroneous spellings. For data representation, we propose the XML-format LearnerXML.