The making of the Litkey Corpus, a richly annotated longitudinal corpus of German texts written by primary school children

Abstract

To date, corpus and computational linguistic work on written language acquisition has mostly dealt with second language learners who have usually already mastered orthography acquisition in their first language. In this paper, we present the Litkey Corpus, a richly-annotated longitudinal corpus of written texts produced by primary school children in Germany from grades 2 to 4. The paper focuses on the (semi-)automatic annotation procedure at various linguistic levels, which include POS tags, features of the word-internal structure (phonemes, syllables, morphemes) and key orthographic features of the target words as well as a categorization of spelling errors. Comprehensive evaluations show that high accuracy was achieved on all levels, making the Litkey Corpus a useful resource for corpus-based research on literacy acquisition of German primary school children and for developing NLP tools for educational purposes. The corpus is freely available under https://www.linguistics.rub.de/litkeycorpus/.