Language Technology Lab | Dr. Ronja Laarmann-Quante

Dr. Ronja Laarmann-Quante
Postdoctoral Researcher
ronja.laarmann-quante@fernuni-hagen.de
0000-0002-4800-6212
rlaarmqua

Universitätsstraße 27 – PRG / Gebäude 5, Raum B 118 (1. Etage), 58097 Hagen

As a computational linguist, I work on automatically analyzing and evaluating texts from learners. My goal is to create applications based on language technology and artificial intelligence that support learning and assessment processes.

Texts written by learners often differ greatly from supposedly “perfect” newspaper language; for example, they contain orthographic and grammatical errors. From a computational linguistics perspective, this is both a challenge and an opportunity. My goal is to gain insights into learning processes by automatically analyzing such texts and to develop applications to support learners and teachers in practice.

Research Interests

How can learner texts be processed robustly by the computer?
What role do, e.g., spelling errors play in the evaluation of answers?
What insights can we gain from the computational linguistic analysis of texts about learning processes, e.g., in (written) language acquisition?
How can learners and teachers be supported by language technology applications?

Short CV

Research Assistant at the professorship Computational Linguistics in the Research Cluster „Digitalization, Diversity and Lifelong Learning – Consequences for Higher Education“ (D²L²) at the FernUniversität in Hagen since April 2022
PhD in Computational Linguistics at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (2020)
Research Assistant at the Language Technology Lab at the Universität Duisburg-Essen (2019-2022)
Research Assistant in the interdisciplinary research project “Literacy as the key to social participation: Psycholinguistic perspectives on orthography instruction and literacy acquisition” at the Department of Linguistics at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Master of Arts in Linguistics (focus Computational Linguistics) at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (2015)
Bachelor of Arts in English Studies and Linguistics (focus Computational Linguistics) at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (2013)

Publications

2021

Künstliche Intelligenz in der Bildung

Zesch, Torsten, Horbach, Andrea, and Laarmann-Quante, Ronja

Unikate: Berichte aus Forschung und Lehre Dec 2021

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Rechtschreibfehler

Laarmann-Quante, Ronja

In NewsIR@SIGIR Feb 2021

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Fehleranalyse

Laarmann-Quante, Ronja

In NewsIR@SIGIR Feb 2021

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Prediction of spelling errors in freely-written texts of German primary school children

Laarmann-Quante, Ronja

In NewsIR@SIGIR Feb 2021

2019

The Litkey Corpus: A richly annotated longitudinal corpus of German texts written by primary school children

Laarmann-Quante, Ronja, Ortmann, Katrin, Ehlert, Anna, Masloch, Simon, Scholz, Doreen, Belke, Eva, and Dipper, Stefanie

Behavior Research Methods Feb 2019

Abstract

Compared to early language development, later changes to the language system during orthography and literacy acquisition have not yet been researched in detail. We present a longitudinal corpus of texts on short picture stories written by German primary school children between grades 2 and 4 and grades 3 and 4. It includes 1,922 texts with 212,505 tokens (6,364 types) from 251 children. For each text, rich metadata is available, including age, grade and linguistic background (at least 60% of the children were multilingual). To our knowledge, our corpus is the largest longitudinal corpus of written texts by children at primary school age. Each word is included in its original spelling as well as in a normalized form (target hypothesis), specifying the intended word form, which we corrected for orthographic but not grammatical errors. Original and target word forms are aligned character-wise and the target word forms are enriched with phonological, syllabic, and morphological information. Additionally, for each target word form, we established key lexical variables, e.g., word frequency or summed bigram frequency, as specified in childLex. Where applicable, we also specify key features of German orthography (e.g., consonant doubling, vowel-lengthening \textlessh\textgreater). Taken together, this information allows for a detailed assessment of the properties of words that tend to increase the likelihood of spelling errors. The corpus is available in different formats-as tab-delimited annotated token and type based lists, in an XML format, and via the corpus search tool ANNIS.
The Litkey Spelling Error Annotation Scheme: Guidelines for the Annotation of Orthographic Errors in German Texts

Laarmann-Quante, Ronja, Ehlert, Anna, Ortmann, Katrin, Scholz, Doreen, Betken, Carina, Knichel, Lukas, Masloch, Simon, and Dipper, Stefanie

Bochumer Linguistische Arbeitsberichte (BLA) Feb 2019

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The making of the Litkey Corpus, a richly annotated longitudinal corpus of German texts written by primary school children

Laarmann-Quante, Ronja, Dipper, Stefanie, and Belke, Eva

In Proceedings of the 13th Linguistic Annotation Workshop Aug 2019

Abstract PDF

To date, corpus and computational linguistic work on written language acquisition has mostly dealt with second language learners who have usually already mastered orthography acquisition in their first language. In this paper, we present the Litkey Corpus, a richly-annotated longitudinal corpus of written texts produced by primary school children in Germany from grades 2 to 4. The paper focuses on the (semi-)automatic annotation procedure at various linguistic levels, which include POS tags, features of the word-internal structure (phonemes, syllables, morphemes) and key orthographic features of the target words as well as a categorization of spelling errors. Comprehensive evaluations show that high accuracy was achieved on all levels, making the Litkey Corpus a useful resource for corpus-based research on literacy acquisition of German primary school children and for developing NLP tools for educational purposes. The corpus is freely available under https://www.linguistics.rub.de/litkeycorpus/.

2017

Towards a tool for automatic spelling error analysis and feedback generation for freely written German texts produced by primary school children

Laarmann-Quante, Ronja

In Proceedings of the Seventh ISCA Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE) Aug 2017
Annotating orthographic target hypotheses in a German L1 learner corpus

Laarmann-Quante, Ronja, Ortmann, Katrin, Ehlert, Anna, Vogel, Maurice, and Dipper, Stefanie

In Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA) Aug 2017

Abstract PDF

NLP applications for learners often rely on annotated learner corpora. Thereby, it is important that the annotations are both meaningful for the task, and consistent and reliable. We present a new longitudinal L1 learner corpus for German (handwritten texts collected in grade 2–4), which is transcribed and annotated with a target hypothesis that strictly only corrects orthographic errors, and is thereby tailored to research and tool development for orthographic issues in primary school. While for most corpora, transcription and target hypothesis are not evaluated, we conducted a detailed inter-annotator agreement study for both tasks. Although we achieved high agreement, our discussion of cases of disagreement shows that even with detailed guidelines, annotators differ here and there for different reasons, which should also be considered when working with transcriptions and target hypotheses of other corpora, especially if no explicit guidelines for their construction are known.
Guidelines for the Manual Transcription and Orthographic Normalization of Handwritten German Texts Produced by Primary School Children

Laarmann-Quante, Ronja, Ortmann, Katrin, Ehlert, Anna, Betken, Carina, Dipper, Stefanie, and Knichel, Lukas

Bochumer Linguistische Arbeitsberichte (BLA) Aug 2017

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2016

Annotating spelling errors in German texts produced by primary school children

Laarmann-Quante, Ronja, Knichel, Lukas, Dipper, Stefanie, and Betken, Carina

In Proceedings of the 10th Linguistic Annotation Workshop held in conjunction with ACL 2016 (LAW-X 2016) Aug 2016
Automating multi-level annotations of orthographic properties of German words and children’s spelling errors

Laarmann-Quante, Ronja

In Proceedings of the 2nd Language Teaching, Learning and Technology Workshop (LTLT) Aug 2016
An annotation scheme for the comparison of different genres of social media with a focus on normalization

Laarmann-Quante, Ronja, and Dipper, Stefanie

In Proceedings of the LREC-Workshop on Normalisation and Analysis of Social Media Texts (NormSoMe) Aug 2016

2015

Automatic analysis of orthographic properties of German words

Laarmann-Quante, Ronja

In Proceedings of the LREC-Workshop on Normalisation and Analysis of Social Media Texts (NormSoMe) Aug 2015

2014

Indirect answers as potential solutions to decision problems

Stevens, Jon Scott, Benz, Anton, Reuße, Sebastian, Laarmann-Quante, Ronja, and Klabunde, Ralf

In Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue Aug 2014

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