Encoding document information in a corpus of student writing: the British Academic Written English corpus

Abstract

The information contained in a document is only partly represented by the wording of the text; in addition, features of formatting and layout can be combined to lend specific functionality to chunks of text (e.g., section headings, highlighting, enumeration through list formatting, etc.). Such functional features, although based on the ‘objective’ typographical surface of the document, are often inconsistently realised and encoded only implicitly, i.e., they depend on deciphering by a competent reader. They are characteristic of documents produced with standard text-processing tools. We discuss the representation of such information with reference to the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus of student writing, currently under construction at the universities of Warwick, Reading and Oxford Brookes. Assignments are usually submitted to the corpus as Microsoft Word documents and make heavy use of surface-based functional features. As the documents are to be transformed into XML-encoded corpus files, this information can only be preserved through explicit annotation, based on interpretation. We present a discussion of the choices made in the BAWE corpus and the practical requirements for a tagging interface.