A Searching Tool for Russian Error-Annotated Learner English Corpus

Abstract

Learner corpora constitute an effective resource for specialists in fields of second language acquisition, foreign language teaching and corpus linguistics. They tend to get significant scholarly help from statistical tools of various kinds. However, for valuable usage of a corpus it should provide convenient and powerful tools for searching and manipulating data. In this paper we focus on searching tools, presented in Russian Error-Annotated Learner English Corpus (REALEC), report our attempts to improve the format of the searching tools in our corpora. We also provide evidences that database search is much more efficient than common text search and demonstrate that search functionality in corpora is of great importance for research efficiency and extensive facilities.