Kansai University Bilingual Essay Corpus Project and Prospects for Research and Pedagogical Applications

摘要

This is an interim report of the Kansai University Bilingual Essay Corpus Project currently being undertaken at the Faculty of Foreign Language Studies of Kansai University (KU) by the above authors. The project officially began in April 2012 for the primary purposes of (1) collecting essaydata written both in English and Japanese on 13 different topics by the KU students and compiling them into a large-scale bilingual corpus, and (2) analyzing the corpus data from various viewpoints, be they lexical, syntactic, organizational, rhetorical or otherwise, to properly assess and gain insights into the students’ linguistic and compositional competences in both languages. The English part of the corpus (ver. 2012) currently contains approx. 650,000 running words, and the Japanese part approx. 1.5 million Kana-kanji characters. The corpus size will be twice as large as that of the current version by the end of 2013. The project also aims to develop an error tagger and a logical/organizational features editor, which the authors believe will be instrumental in otherwise time-consumingannotation work. Some of the research questions the authors plan to pursue in the course of the next phase of the project will also be outlined at the end of this report.