Encoding document information in a corpus of student writing: the British Academic Written English corpus

Abstract

The information contained in a document is only partly represented by the wording of the text; in addition, features of formatting and layout can be combined to lend specific functionality to chunks of text (e.g., section headings, highlighting, enumeration through list formatting, etc.). Such functional features, although based on the ‘objective’ typographical surface of the document, are often inconsistently realised and encoded only implicitly, i.e., they depend on deciphering by a competent reader. They are characteristic of documents produced with standard text-processing tools. We discuss the representation of such information with reference to the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus of student writing, currently under construction at the universities of Warwick, Reading and Oxford Brookes. Assignments are usually submitted to the corpus as Microsoft Word documents and make heavy use of surface-based functional features. As the documents are to be transformed into XML-encoded corpus files, this information can only be preserved through explicit annotation, based on interpretation. We present a discussion of the choices made in the BAWE corpus and the practical requirements for a tagging interface.

Phraseological teddy bears

“…The word counts given in Table 1 are exclusive of the ignored material. See Ebeling and Heuboeck (2007) and the respective corpus manuals (Paquot et al 2010, Heuboeck, Holmes, andNesi 2008) for more information regarding the annotation.…”

The Varieties of English for Specific Purposes dAtabase (VESPA): Towards a multi-L1 and multi-register learner corpus of disciplinary writing

“…These steps resulted in marked-up .xml files that are then ready for inclusion into VESPA. More specifically, following the procedure used in the BAWE corpus (Ebeling and Heuboeck 2007;Heuboeck et al 2008), the texts were first processed using Word macros to annotate main sections (e.g. abstract, introduction), block quotes and so-called mentioned items (e.g.…”

From student hard drive to web corpus (part 2): the annotation and online distribution of the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP)

“…We plan to make MICUSP available in both full XML and plain text (i.e., with no annotation or metadata). While for each of the original file formats (e.g., Word, PDF) it might have been possible to make use of the formatting codes and styles in the original document (as demonstrated in Ebeling and Heuboeck, 2007), we decided to transform all the original files into plain text Unicode at the start of the conversion process in order to achieve consistency in the subsequent steps.…”