The Write & Improve Corpus 2024
Paper: The Write & Improve Corpus 2024
Description: The Write & Improve Corpus 2024 contains essays written by second language (L2) learners of English at various proficiency levels. Essays were submitted to the Write & Improve essay practice platform, on which automated error feedback and marking are provided. The learner can then revise and resubmit their essay in order to request new error feedback and marks.
We built the Corpus with sets of essays submitted by individual users of Write & Improve in response to a given prompt. There are 5050 of these ‘user-prompt sets’ written by 766 learners of L2 English. The final versions of these essay sets amount to 762K word tokens. In total there are 23K essays, including the earlier versions in each essay set.
We have annotated the first and final version in each essay set with grammatical errors, and certified though non-operational examiners have labelled each of the final essay versions with an indicative CEFR label. In this first release of the Corpus, we release the final versions of the essays only, as parallel texts in original and corrected form. This is the format required for the MultiGEC-2025 shared task. In a future release of the Corpus we will include more data and the CEFR labels. Please bookmark this page and check again in future; or contact us to be notified when a new version of the Corpus is published.
Data security: Please be aware of the problems of leaking benchmark datasets to LLMs (e.g. Balloccu et al, EACL 2024). Please only use this Corpus with LLMs hosted locally (e.g. after download from Hugging Face Transformers) or with no retention of data for training if using LLMs via commercial APIs.
Publication date: 2024
Keywords: Cambridge University Press & Assessment, Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, CEFR, learners of English as a second language, essay writing, Write & Improve
Authors and Contributors: Cambridge University Press & Assessment (2024). The Write & Improve Corpus 2024. See dataset release paper for contributors.
Citing this paper: Diane Nicholls, Andrew Caines, Paula Buttery (2024). The Write & Improve Corpus 2024. Cambridge University Press & Assessment. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.112997
@article{wicorpus24,
author = {Diane Nicholls and Andrew Caines and Paula Buttery},
year = {2024},
title = {The {W}rite \& {I}mprove {C}orpus 2024: Error-annotated and {CEFR}-labelled essays by learners of {E}nglish},
publisher = {Cambridge University Press & Assessment},
url = {https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.112997}
}
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