# Universal Dependencies for Learner English

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.04278 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.04278/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 13 May 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [SynGEC: Syntax-Enhanced Grammatical Error Correction with a Tailored GEC-Oriented Parser](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12484/) (2022)
- [Towards Automated Document Revision: Grammatical Error Correction, Fluency Edits, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11484/) (2022)
- [SERRANT: a syntactic classifier for English Grammatical Error Types](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02310/) (2021)
- [How Universal is Genre in Universal Dependencies?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04971/) (2021)
- [Cross-linguistically Consistent Semantic and Syntactic Annotation of Child-directed Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10952/) (2021)
- [Data-driven Parsing Evaluation for Child-Parent Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13778/) (2022)
- [Second language Korean Universal Dependency treebank v1.2: Focus on data augmentation and annotation scheme refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14718/) (2025)
- [UD-KSL Treebank v1.3: A semi-automated framework for aligning XPOS-extracted units with UPOS tags](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09009/) (2025)
- [Is Argument Structure of Learner Chinese Understandable: A Corpus-Based Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09186/) (2023)
- [Exploiting the English Grammar Profile for L2 grammatical analysis with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17171/) (2026)
- [Parser agreement and disagreement in L2 Korean UD: Implications for human-in-the-loop annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06625/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce the Treebank of Learner English (TLE), the first publicly available syntactic treebank for English as a Second Language (ESL). The TLE provides manually annotated POS tags and Universal Dependency (UD) trees for 5,124 sentences from the Cambridge First Certificate in English (FCE) corpus. The UD annotations are tied to a pre-existing error annotation of the FCE, whereby full syntactic analyses are provided for both the original and error corrected versions of each sentence. Further on, we delineate ESL annotation guidelines that allow for consistent syntactic treatment of ungrammatical English. Finally, we benchmark POS tagging and dependency parsing performance on the TLE dataset and measure the effect of grammatical errors on parsing accuracy. We envision the treebank to support a wide range of linguistic and computational research on second language acquisition as well as automatic processing of ungrammatical language. The treebank is available at universaldependencies.org. The annotation manual used in this project and a graphical query engine are available at esltreebank.org.