We are proud to announce collaboration with Markus Dickinson and Paul Richards from the Department of Linguistics, Indiana University on a project  that will analyse syntactic structures in the Trinity Lancaster Corpus. The focus of the project is to develop a syntactic annotation scheme of spoken learner language and apply this scheme to the Trinity Lancaster Corpus, which is being compiled at Lancaster University in collaboration with Trinity College London. The aim of the project is to provide an annotation layer for the corpus that will allow sophisticated exploration of the morphosyntactic and syntactic structures in learner speech. The project will have an impact on both the theoretical understanding of spoken language production at different proficiency levels as well as on the development of practical NLP solutions for annotation of learner speech.  More specific goals include:

• Identification of units of spoken production and their automatic recognition.
• Annotation and visualization of morphosyntactic and syntactic structures in learner speech.
• Contribution to the development of syntactic complexity measures for learner speech.
• Description of the syntactic development of spoken learner production.