The CELI corpus: Design and linguistic annotation of a new online learner corpus

Abstract

This article introduces the CELI corpus, a new learner corpus of written Italian consisting of ca. 600,000 tokens, evenly distributed among CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) proficiency levels B1, B2, C1 and C2. The collected texts derive from the language certification exams administered by the University for Foreigners of Perugia all around the world. The corpus contains rich metadata pertaining to text-related and learner-related variables. It expands the domain of learner corpora by being, among other things, both freely available online to the research community, and by focusing on a target language other than English. The article also presents and evaluates the POS-tagging procedure, thus contributing to best practices in learner corpus annotation.

Utility of Kolmogorov complexity measures: Analysis of L2 groups and L1 backgrounds

“…First, this study examined complexity in four Indo-European languages which, despite their observed differences, share common features (e.g., the same writing script). This is because most of the CEFR rated learner corpora focus on L2 Indo-European languages [ 92 ], e.g., [ 93 ], and the presence of an objective measure of L2 proficiency was necessary to examine the L2 effect in a robust manner. Investigating the utility of this information-theoretic complexity measure for L2 production in other non-Indo-European languages such as Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Arabic remains worthwhile.…”

Learner corpora and the design of data-driven learning activities

“…The CELI corpus (Spina et al, 2022(Spina et al, , 2023 1 is a learner corpus of Italian. It consists of written texts collected from the Italian language certification exams known as CELI, Certificati di Lingua Italiana 2 .…”