An Assessment of Language Elicitation without the Supervision of a Linguist

Date: Apr 17, 2007
Presenter: Lori Levin and Alison Alvarez
Title: An Assessment of Language Elicitation without the Supervision of a Linguist

We created an elicitation corpus designed to elicit the morphosyntactic
features of a target language without the supervision of a linguist.
The corpus is composed of approximately 3200 English source sentences
that are then translated by a native speaker into the target language.
The design of our corpus was driven by our need to elicit morphosyntactic
language features without the supervision of a linguist. In a previous
paper we reported on a reverse Treebank and that was a deep
morphosyntactic tree with two parallel human language sentences. The
first is provided by reverse annotation and the second is acquired
through elicitation. This presentation will focus on the extent to which
we able to acquire our morphosyntactic information from our translated
corpora and the types of errors we encountered, both from the perspective
of the translator and the corpus itself.