Karlsruhe Children's Text

Item Name: Karlsruhe Children's Text
Author(s): Johanna Fay
LDC Catalog No.: LDC2015T22
ISBN: 1-58563-734-3
ISLRN: 840-846-753-370-2
DOI: https://doi.org/10.35111/13mf-v667
Release Date: October 15, 2015
Member Year(s): 2015
DCMI Type(s): Text, StillImage
Data Source(s): essays
Application(s): machine translation, handwriting recognition
Language(s): German
Language ID(s): deu
License(s): LDC User Agreement for Non-Members
Online Documentation: LDC2015T22 Documents
Licensing Instructions: Subscription & Standard Members, and Non-Members
Citation: Fay, Johanna. Karlsruhe Children's Text LDC2015T22. Web Download. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, 2015.
Related Works: View

Introduction

Karlsruhe Children's Text was developed by the Cooperative State University Baden-Württemberg, University of Education and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. It consists of over 14,000 freely written, German sentences from more than 1,700 school children in grades one through eight.

The data collection was conducted in 2011-2013 at elementary and secondary schools in and around Karlsruhe, Germany. Students were asked to write as verbose a text as possible. Those in grades one to four were read two stories and were then asked to write their own stories. Students in grades five through eight were instructed to write on a specific theme, such as "Imagine the world in 20 years. What has changed?"

The goal of the collection was to use the data to develop a spelling error classification system.

Data

Annotators converted the handwritten text into digital form with all errors committed by the writers; they also created an orthographically correct version of every sentence. Metadata about the text was gathered, including the circumstances under which it was collected, information about the student writer and background about spelling lessons in the particular class. In a second step, the students' spelling errors were annotated into general groupings: grapheme level, syllable level, morphology and syntax. The files were anonymized in a third step.

This release also contains metadata regarding the writers’ language biography, teaching methodology, age, gender and school year. The average age of the participants was 11 years, and the gender distribution was nearly equal.

Original handwriting is presented as JPEG format image files and the converted annotated text as UTF-8 plain text. Metadata is contained within each text file.

Samples

Please view these image and text samples.

Updates

None at this time.

Additional Citation

Users should cite this paper in any publication that describes this corpus.

Preparing Children's Writing Database for Automated Processing
Rémi Lavalley, Kay Berkling, Sebastian Stüker,
Workshop on Language Teaching, Learning and Technology (LTLT)
Leipzig, September 4, 2015

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