Language policy and usage in the post-communist region have continually attracted wide political, media, and expert attention since the disintegration of the USSR in 1991. How are these issues politicized in contemporary Estonia, Latvia, and Ukraine? This study presents a cross-cultural qualitative and quantitative analysis of publications in leading Russian-language blogs and news websites of these three post-Soviet states during the period of 2004–2017. The most notable difference observed between Ukraine and the two Baltic countries is that many Russian-writing users in Ukraine’s internet tend to support the position that the state language, i.e. Ukrainian, is discriminated against and needs special protection by the state, whereas the majority of the Russian-speaking commentators on selected Estonian and Latvian news websites advocate for introducing Russian as a second state language. Despite attempts of Ukraine’s government to Ukrainize public space, the position of Ukrainian is still perceived, even by many Russian-writing commentators and bloggers, as being ‘precarious’ and ‘vulnerable’. This became especially visible in debates after the Revolution of Dignity, when the number of supporters of the introduction of Russian as second state language significantly decreased. In the Russian-language sector of Estonian and Latvian news websites and blogs, in contrast, the majority of online users continually reproduce the image of ‘victims’ of nation-building. They often claim that their political, as well as economic rights, are significantly limited in comparison to ethnic Estonians and Latvians. The results of Maksimovtsova’s research illustrate that, notwithstanding differences between the Estonian as well as Latvian cases, on the one hand, and Ukraine, on the other, there is an ongoing process of convergence of debates in Ukraine to those held in the other two countries analyzed in terms of an increased degree of ‘discursive decommunization’ and ‘derussification’.

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the gapping dataset for Russian that consists of 7.5k sentences with gapping (as well as 15k relevant negative sentences) and comprises data from various genres: news, fiction, social media and technical texts. The dataset was prepared for the Automatic Gapping Resolution Shared Task for Russian (AGRR-2019) - a competition aimed at stimulating the development of NLP tools and methods for processing of ellipsis. In this paper, we pay special attention to the gapping resolution methods that were introduced within the shared task as well as an alternative test set that illustrates that our corpus is a diverse and representative subset of Russian language gapping sufficient for effective utilization of machine learning techniques.

The goals of research on conceptual metaphor in discourse are at present remarkably multifaceted, from describing specific social, pragmatic, rhetorical, aesthetic, and discursive functions in real discourse data, through assessing metaphor entrenchment in the cultural and conceptual system, to identification methods as well as criteria for metaphorical mapping description and classification. The volume the reader is about to explore provides a broad panorama of perspectives tackling diverse aspects of metaphor analysis, including a wide range of topics such as the levels of source domain knowledge configuration, new Metaphor analysis in discourse. Introduction 7 target domain knowledge, conscious usage, metaphor identification procedures, communicative functions, linguistic metaphor, visual modes of metaphorical expression, corpus processing, trans-modal metaphor, among others. One of the assets of this collective work consists in showing how the scrutiny of metaphorical connections in multimodal discourse reveals the conceptual nature of metaphorical thinking. The book is organized in three parts, each one focussing on certain aspects of metaphor analysis in discourse. The first part emphasizes the description and characterization of metaphorical knowledge. The chapters offer a view on knowledge configurations like image schemas, frames, scenarios and domains that configure particular kinds of discourse and knowledge. The second part puts the stress on communicative aspects, particularly on the analysis of author/speaker intentionality and the tools to measure intention and effect in metaphor usage. Finally, the third block in the volume delves into the intricacies of disclosing metaphorical codes in non-linguistic modes of semiosis, be it cartoons, film, or other visual media.

Proceedings of Third Workshop "Computational linguistics and language science"

This book examines the function and development of the cult of saints in Coptic Egypt, focusing primarily on the material provided by the texts forming the Coptic hagiographical tradition of the early Christian martyr Philotheus of Antioch, and more specifically, the Martyrdom of St Philotheus of Antioch (Pierpont Morgan M583). This Martyrdom is a reflection of a once flourishing cult which is attested in Egypt by rich textual and material evidence. This text enjoyed great popularity not only in Egypt, but also in other countries of the Christian East, since his dossier includes texts in Coptic, Georgian, Ethiopic, and Arabic.

This book is an investigation into the grammar of Mehweb (Dargwa, East Caucasian also known as Nakh-Daghestanian) based on several years of team fieldwork. Mehweb is spoken in one village community in Daghestan, Russia, with a population of some 800 people, In many ways, Mehweb is a typical East Caucasian language: it has a rich inventory of consonants; an extensive system of spatial forms in nouns and converbs and volitional forms in verbs; pervasive gender-number agreement; and ergative alignment in case marking and in gender agreement. It is also a typical language of the Dargwa branch, with symmetrical verb inflection in the imperfective and perfective paradigm and extensive use of spatial encoding for experiencers. Although Mehweb is clearly close to the northern varieties of Dargwa, it has been long isolated from the main body of Dargwa varieties by speakers of Avar and Lak. As a result of both independent internal evolution and contact with its neighbours, Mehweb developed some deviant properties, including accusatively aligned egophoric agreement, a split in the feminine gender, and the typologically rare grammatical categories of verificative and apprehensive. But most importantly, Mehweb is where our friends live.

This book consists of previously unpublished manuscripts by Vygotsky found in the first systematic study of Vygotsky’s family archive. The notebooks and scientific diaries gathered in this volume represent all periods of Vygotsky’s scientific life, beginning with the earliest manuscript, entitled The tragicomedy of strivings (1912), and ending with his last note, entitled Pro domo sua (1934), written shortly before his death. The notes reveal unknown aspects of the eminent psychologist’s personality, show his aspirations and interests, and allow us to gain insights into the development of his thinking and its internal dynamics. Several texts reflect the plans that Vygotsky was unable to realize during his lifetime, such as the creation of a theory of emotions and a theory of consciousness, others reveal Vygotsky’s involvement in activities that were previously unknown, and still others provide outlines of papers and lectures. The notes are presented in chronological order, preceded by brief introductions and accompanied by an extensive set of notes. The result is a book that allows us to obtain a much deeper understanding of Vygotsky’s innovative ideas. 

The given book is aimed at bachelor students for Law facultywhoo need to create a project proposal for their Final paaper. Inthis book students will find recommendations for writinf research proposals and samples of papers with detailed analysis , exercises and theoretical framework. The students will be able to present the results of their scintific studies either in oral or wriiten form.

Linguists have long classified languages according to the ways in which their intransitive subjects, transitive subjects, and direct objects align with respect to case marking and/or agreement. The two main divisions are known as the (nominative–)accusative and ergative(–absolutive) alignments.  Under an accusative alignment pattern, the intransitive subject (abbreviated here as S) and the transitive subject (A: for agent, or agent-like argument) are encoded the same way (nominative), while the transitive direct object (O) is encoded separately (accusative). Under an ergative alignment pattern, on the other hand, S and O have identical encoding (absolutive) while A has its own separate case (ergative); see Comrie (1978); Dixon (1979; 1994); Manning (1996); Aldridge (2008); McGregor (2009); among others. These alignments can be expressed not only through case marking but also through agreement; S and A may determine the same agreement, in contrast to O, or S and O may license the same agreement, in contrast to A.

The book comprises study materials for learning English. It aims at developing students' communication skills which are necessary for using English in every day life and professional activities. The book provides learners with extra opportunities for developing their listening, pronunciation, vocabulary and speaking skills through the use of authentic video content selected in accordance with the requirements of the ESL course.

The resource book is a collection of twelve lessons based on a selection of TED talks about different aspects of modern life. The selected TED talks not only enhance the learners’ English language proficiency but also develop the learners’ professional competencies and expand their outlook.  All the lessons have a regular structure and include exercises for developing vocabulary, listening, reading, speaking, note-taking and writing skills. A quick test has been developed for each lesson checking the student’s assimilation of the material.  Through authentic models of effective communication, students build fluency to achieve academic and personal success. The resource book can be used both for classroom activities and for independent work. 

The book is devoted to qualifying parts of speech: adjective and adverb.

The book is devoted to linguistic problems of professional information exchange among specialists of various fields. 

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language, AINL 2018, held in St. Petersburg, Russia, in October 2018. The 19 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 56 submissions and cover a wide range of topics, including morphology and word-level semantics, sentence and discourse representations, corpus linguistics, language resources, and social interaction analysis. 

"Zholkovsky’s work—vast in scope and eclectic in methodology—has long been humanizing semiotics in both the Russian and American academy, giving it a face, a sense of humor, a stake in the real worlds we live by, but never losing its structuralist bedrock. The essays collected here, which range from Pushkin to Fyodor Karamazov, Okudzhava and Sedakova, from Peter the Great’s scandals abroad to Russian literary theory and filmmaking at home, are a goldmine by leading Slavists in North America, Europe, and Russia. A huge book of brilliant nuggets, it lights up the contours of our field today while paying perfect vignette-like tribute to Alik’s long non-conformist career, as fascinating and inscrutably flexible as it was often perilous.” (By Caryl Emerson). *** “This book is a wonderful gift not only for the 'jubilee celebrant' (for AZ it is impossible to imagine this phrase without quotes), but for all of us. The variety of topics, genres and authors might seem surprising were it not for the fact that this variety reflects the character of the book’s addressee. Its content, better than any manifesto or theoretical treatise, brings us good news: that a lack of intellectual inhibition, an unrestricted field of vision, and an enthusiasm that does not cloy are all so becoming to scholarship that, in essence, has as its sole palpable subject the infinity of creative choices. I have always liked Mayakovsky’s neologism: 'Do not jubilee!' (He himself, though, was very much concerned with his own anniversaries.) A / Z is completely devoid of the sedate smoothness of octogenaric jubilees, but it has a lot of panache and a spirit of intellectual adventure, and most importantly, fun. In this, the book bears a striking resemblance to its addressee.” (By Boris Gasparov).

Scandinavian motifs, both religious and related to arts and crafts, are typically deprived of their religious content in the process of Christianization as percieved in Old Rus' literature in which myths are treated as faded histories or legends.

The Caucasus is the place with the greatest linguistic variation in Europe. The present volume explores this variation within the tense, aspect, mood, and evidentiality systems in the languages of the North-East Caucasian (or Nakh-Daghestanian) family. The papers of the volume cover the most challenging and typologically interesting features such as aspect and the complicated interaction of aspectual oppositions expressed by stem allomorphy and inflectional paradigms, grammaticalized evidentiality and mirativity, and the semantics of rare verbal categories such as the deliberative (‘May I go?’), the noncurative (‘Let him go, I don’t care’), different types of habituals (gnomic, qualitative, non-generic), and perfective tenses (aorist, perfect, resultative). The book offers an overview of these features in order to gain a broader picture of the verbal semantics covering the whole North-East Caucasian family. At the same time it provides in-depth studies of the most fascinating phenomena.

Tradition of oral narratives is one of the most prominent types of communicative behavior in Northern Athabaskan cultures. This paper focuses on personal stories as material for the study of linguacultural models and their persistence in the situation of a linguacultural shift. The data comes from the personal stories, told in English, by the Athabaskans inhabiting inner Alaska, namely by the representatives of the last bilingual generation speaking the Upper Kuskokwim Athabascan (UKA) language. The goal of the paper is to analyze specific formal and thematic features of the UKA storytelling tradition, to the degree in which they can be traced in spite of the language shift. A brief sketch of the UKA cultural values and sociocultural dynamics of the community in the last 50-70 years is given prior to the analysis of the culturally relevant themes and formal features of the personal stories told in English. The results confirm the hypothesis that coherence in Alaskan Athabaskan stories of personal experience is based on the integrity of the linguacultural models needed for their interpretation and Alaskan Athabaskan cultural traditions of storytelling, determining both the structure of the stories and the dynamics of storytelling situations.

The paper provides a historical background for the “reversal” concept of truth. In Attic drama, Plato found a way to approach the problem of conflict between the good and justice. By overcoming deficiencies of tragic representations, Plato came to understand human reality as a complex plot, prone to a complete change. His philosophical solution consisted of two steps: the birth of a proper narrative of the good and the verification of this narrative by a corresponding common narrative of justice. This verification is the basis for the reversal concept of truth, traces of which are operative also in Descartes and Heidegger.

The corrupt Masoretic reading לַחְפֹּר פֵּרוֹת at Isa 2:20 is usually restored as לַחֲפַרְפָּרוֹת, which is interpreted as ‘to the moles’. The alternative interpretation of לחפרפרות as ‘to the bats’, first attested in Ibn Ezra, may in fact be preferable, as it is supported by the (previously ignored) evidence of the Fragmentary Targum, which use חפרפרא to translate Hebrew עֲטַלֵּף (‘bat’) at Deu 14:18.

This paper deals with the study of rhythmical structure in metrical verse against the background of probability language models of meter. The various models correspond to the varying conditions in which versification occurs.  Depending on the extent to which these models conform, or do not conform, to the verse parameters, we can create hypothetical reconstructions of the versification mechanisms by different poets and in different languages.  This method can open a new perspective for the comparative and cognitive study of verse.

In response to the growing demand for highly proficient foreign language (L2) speakers in professional work settings, scholars and educators have increasingly turned their attention to methods for developing greater fluency in their learners who aspire to such jobs. Engaging in persuasive writing and argumentation has been shown to promote both written and oral proficiency among advanced L2 learners (Brown, 2009). This study focuses on the application of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) proficiency guidelines and standards to the design of teletandem courses in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and Russian as a Foreign Language developed to promote Advanced and Superior-level language gains. ACTFL Can-Do statements were used to evaluate learners’ self-reported language gains as a result of participating in the course. The results indicated that such an approach can indeed yield significant perceived gains, especially for spoken language, for all the participants regardless of their target language and home institution.

The article describes the morphology and function of one of the derived stems, labelled as stem II, in Soqotri, a Modern South Arabian language. It includes the discussion of the conjugation of the strong verbs, of various types of weak verbs, of the verbs with mixed conjugation. The semantics of stem II also receives considerable attention.

The study explores whether subject-verb-object in aphasia may be a strategy to self-cue the production of the verb by first retrieving its semantically related arguments. 

The paper contains a review on a recently published volume ‘The Syriac World’, edited by Daniel King, which is dedicated to various aspects of Syriac culture, including history, literature, language and arts. 

The article deals with the problem of “inner space” in the two prominent works of kokkeibon, a genre of gesaku, light popular fiction of Tokugawa period (1603–1867), “Tōkaidōchū hizakurige” by Jippensha Ikku  (1765–1831) and “Ukiyoburo” by Shikitei Sanba (1775–1822). The creation of the unique settings, namely, the Tōkaidō road and its post stations in “Tōkaidōchū hizakurige” and a public bath in “Ukiyoburo” is considered to be a special artistic method, which is not just a device to develop a light funny atmosphere of the literary works mentioned, but also a mechanism, uncovering deeper layers of psycologism and mindset. There are two types of “inner worlds” found in the works of Ikku and Sanba: an “anti-world” of “Tōkaidōchū hizakurige”, where the spirit of grotesque, absurdity and situational comedy prevails, and an “idealistic world” of “Ukiyoburo”, in which humor and morality are found in the everyday situations and conversations. It is also assumed that the tags of “anti-world” and “idealistic world” in terms of these literary works can correspond with the “men’s world” and “women’s world” respectively.

 

EFL methodology has always recognized the importance of giving student learners of foreign languages regular and quick feedback on student speech production, both written and oral, but over the past two decades there appeared various tools ensuring the provision of automated instant feedback. The presented paper offers such a tool that focuses on measuring text complexity, which will hopefully translate into reasonable feedback about the level of language proficiency when taking into account those text features that are significant for Russian learners of English. The application provides students with advice on how to improve the weaker aspects of the evaluated essay and underlines the relevant linguistic features of the text - for example, the number of adjectival clauses. We point out what text features are more relevant for the assessment of the essays written in English by Russian students. We analyzed 3440 texts from Russian ErrorAnnotated English Learner Corpus, and for each of them we calculated the text criteria values. Then we used the methods of machine learning and statistical analysis to predict the grade that could be received for the essay.

This paper focus on periphrastic nominalization — a construction which has nominal external syntax and which is used to express complement clauses. In this paper we examine the morphological and syntactic properties of this construction and compare those properties with those of typical nominalizations. In particular, a classification of nominalization into processes and results is used as the basis for comparison. As it is a crucial point regarding the contrast between a word and a construction, we also discuss whether the periphrastic nominalization shows signs of grammaticalization.

This paper deals with the productive morphological causative r(ə)- in Abaza (Northwest Caucasian), a highly polysynthetic ergative language. We discuss the causativization process in Abaza as well as the semantic properties of the construction and elaborate an analysis of the event structure of the Abaza morphological causatives based on the scope of adverbials.

This paper describes a group of derivational verbal suffixes in Abaza, a polysynthetic language belonging to the Northwest Caucasian family. For each suffix I propose a short description of its most remarkable features. In particular, I discuss the polysemy of the refactive and assertive markers and their interaction with the event structure of the verb. Other suffixes such as the putative and inferential markers are interesting due to their peculiar morphological behavior. The diversity of the discussed affixes is tentatively explained by the different pathways of their morphological and semantic development.

The paper focuses on the syntax of noun phrases in Chukchi (Chukokto-Kamchatkan). In Chukchi, structure of noun phrases is drastically different dependent on the case of  its head in several respects: we discuss expression of number, incorporation of adnominal dependents and order of constituent. We suggest several order hierarchies, which can partially explain the observed facts.

A data analysis tool of the Corpus of Russian Poetry (a part of the Russian National Corpus) is designed for quantitative research in various areas of versology and linguistics aspects of poetic texts. The core part, a statistic database of the corpus, includes annotation at the level of texts, verses, words as well as patterns of words, letters and stress. The tool allows a user to study certain properties (e. g. rhyming patterns, lexical co-occurrence) taken alone and in their interaction, both in the whole corpus and in subcorpora. Besides that, it facilitates contrastive studies of two chosen subcorpora and a few case studies demonstrating applicable methods and potential for further research in the field of the Digital literary studies.

The poetic texts pose a challenge to full morphological tagging and lemmatization since the authors seek to extend the vocabulary, employ morphologically and semantically deficient forms, go beyond standard syntactic templates, use non-projective constructions and non-standard word order, among other techniques of the creative language game. In this paper we evaluate a number of probabilistic taggers based on decision trees, CRF and neural network algorithms as well as one state-of-the-art dictionary-based tagger. The taggers were trained on prosaic texts and tested on three poetic samples of different complexity. Firstly, we discuss the method to compile the gold standard datasets for the Russian poetry. Secondly, we evaluate the taggers’ performance in the identification of the part of speech tags and lemmas. Finally, we analyze different types of errors in the taggers’ output. We analyse the confusion matrix of the parts of speech and mismatches in lemma annotation.

The article deals with the method of automatic detection of authors ' gender identity on the material of fiction prose of 1980-2000. During this period, there is a special construct, called "women's prose", which is characterized by a special genre and stylistic originality. We set ourselves the task to find out whether the concept of “women's prose” refers only to the non-text reality or is clearly reflected at the level of language. We have collected corpus of texts 1980-2000 and conducted that identified the most effective machine learning algorithms for the classification of male and female prose.

This work aims at investigating the word order within the nominal domain in Russian Sign Language (RSL) with respect to Universal 20 and a hierarchy of adjectives. Universal 20 proposed by Greenberg (1963) postulates that there are three possibilities of the word order in the noun phrase, namely Demonstrative > Numeral > Adjective > Noun, Noun > Demonstrative > Numeral > Adjective, and Noun > Adjective > Numeral > Demonstrative. Later Cinque (2005) extended the definition of Universal 20 by proposing that actually 14 word orders can be derived from the base-generated word order Demonstrative > Numeral > Adjective > Noun, and, therefore, 14 word orders are acceptable. In addition to that, Scott (2002) proposed that adjectives of different semantic types also have a universal order. In this work we compare RSL data with these hierarchies and conclude that the underlying word order in RSL conforms to Scott's (2002) hierarchy and to Cinque's (2005) definition of Universal 20. In order to derive the underlying word order for RSL we explore which word orders are acceptable, which are unacceptable, and which of the attested word orders are the most neutral. Moreover, we explain the variability of the attested in RSL word orders with the number of modifiers by noun (single modifiers occur in preposition more often than multiple modifiers).

This study deals with the politeness strategies of speakers of Russian, focusing on verbal expression of politeness. After running a field survey in schools in mid-2018, we try to analyze specific verbal markers of expressing politeness quantitatively. Four such markers were selected for this study, namely greeting, leave-taking, expressing gratitude and apology. Quantitative analysis shows that there is a clear frequency pattern found in these markers’ use, indicating a relatively high degree of sociolinguistic variation. Possible causes of this effect are discussed, including cultural diversity and multilingual setting of the modern Russian school communicative domain.

In this paper, a description of sentential negation makers in Russian Sign Language (RSL) is provided. Two types of these markers exist. The first one is a negative sign – a manual negator. The second type is markers that are expressed by facial expressions, and head movements – non-manual negation. Moreover, this observation of sentential negation presents the frequency of manual negators, and the distribution of non-manual negation. The data also shows that in negative constructions the basic word order changes. In addition, I offer an analysis that deals with this phenomenon.

The paper deals with the intonation of native speakers of several regional variants of Russian. I analyze how simple characteristics of pitch movement are connected to biological sex, age, place of living, and type of spontaneous text. According to my primary hypothesis, the distribution of pitch in “low”, “middle” and “high” parts of the pitch range and the number of movements from one range into other ones can predict the aforementioned characteristics of the recordings as well as reveal the individual characteristics of speakers (Vol’skaya 2014, Féry 2017). I demonstrate that in my model the only significant parameter is the biological sex of the speakers, which means that this distribution is unlikely to be determined by the regional differences. The study has been conducted as a part of the project on statistical analysis of regional variants of Standard Russian and minority languages of Russia.

In the early 19th century the words predanie, legenda, and skazanie started to be used by Russian writers as a generic label. The present paper considers the texts with these labels in their titles or subtitles written by Vladimir Odoevsky. First, constituent features of the corpus of the texts labeled as predanie are identified. Then the same categories are explored in the texts marked as legenda and skazanie. The aim of the research is to ascertain whether these texts are built according to similar or different generic patterns. I argue that Odoevsky treated the notions differently, and the generically labelled texts reveal different genre strategies.

Although conflict representation in media has been widely studied, few attempts have been made to perform large-scale comparisons of agendas in the media of conflicting parties, especially for armed country-level confrontations. In this paper, we introduce quantitative evidence of agenda divergence between the media of conflicting parties in the course of the Ukrainian crisis 2013-2014. Using 45,000 messages from the online newsfeeds of a Russian and a Ukrainian TV channels, we perform topic modelling coupled with qualitative analysis to reveal crisis-related topics, assess their salience and map evolution of attention of both channels to each of those topics. We find that the two channels produce fundamentally different agenda sequences: in particular, while the Russian channel pays little attention to confrontation between the Ukrainian government and the opposition before the regime change, the Ukrainian channel is less inclined to cover armed violence in East Ukraine and refugees after the regime change.

The main way to mark the direct object in Russian dialects is the accusative case, but in some constructions the NP in direct object position marked by the nominative case. This case considered in the paper like case of Differential Object Marking (DOM) phenomenon, where NP in direct object position in certain conditions can be marked by the nominative case, but in “normal” conditions it marked by accusative case. The study describes this phenomenon in the North Russian dialects. Some different syntactic constructions with the nominative objects considered from the point of the DOM features: animacy, definiteness, word order, information structure, modality of predicates. In addition, the paper describes the issue of historical development of the constructions and the issue about syntactic status.

The topics explored in this essay include Ivan Andreevich Krylov’s reading practices in his young and mature years, reconstructed on the basis of various sources. The paper recontextualizes Krylov’s unique reading trajectory not always comprehensible for his contemporaries. It also highlights numerous links, not accentuated earlier, between Krylov’s strategies — in life, writing and publishing — and his service as a librarian in the Imperial Public Library of St. Petersburg. The analysis of several situations showing Krylov as a brilliant reciter of his own texts who smartly deals with expectations and obsessions of his audience allows to affirms the existence a special connection, of his personality, considerably mythologized due to his own efforts, the literary genre of fable and the status of classical writer obtained by Krylov by 1830. Sub specie of this connection the transformations of the circle of Krylov’s readers are represented, as well as different ways of perception of his fables by children.

The paper presents a Universal Dependencies (UD) annotation scheme for a learner English corpus. The REALEC dataset consists of essays written in English by Russian-speaking university students in the course of general English. The essays are a part of students' preparation for the independent final examination similar to the international English exam. While adjusting existing dependency parsing tools to a learner data, one has to take into account to what extent students' mistakes provoke errors in the parser output. The ungrammatical and stylistically inappropriate utterances may challenge parsers' algorithms trained on grammatically appropriate written texts. In our experiments, we compared the output of the dependency parser UDpipe (trained on UD-English 2.0) with the results of manual parsing, placing a particular focus on parses of ungrammatical English clauses. We show how mistakes made by students influence the work of the parser. Overall, UDpipe performed reasonably well (UAS 92.9, LAS 91.7). The following cases cause the errors in automatic annotation a) incorrect detection of a head, b) incorrect detection of the relation type, as well as c) both. We propose some solutions which could improve the automatic output and thus make the assessment of syntactic complexity more reliable.

Learner corpora have great potential as sources of educational material. If a corpus contains annotations of mistakes in student works, it can be of use for the recognition and analysis of the most common error patterns. The error-annotation system of the learner corpus REALEC makes it possible to automatically generate different types of test questions and thus form exercises from the corpus data. This paper describes the creation of an automatic multiple-choice generator which works with the specific types of the student errors annotated in the texts of examination essays.