Automatic Quantitative Analysis of Spelling Errors Made by Dutch Elementary School Children
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2021-07-02
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en
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After exactly a year of hard work, I present to you proudly my master thesis titled “Automatic
quantitative analysis of spelling errors made by elementary school children: A BasiScript corpus
study”. This thesis is the end product of my research project in which I developed an algorithm
that automatically detects spelling errors and annotates them with the spelling principle that is
violated. Application of this algorithm to the BasiScript corpus, which consists of more than eighty
thousand digitized handwritten texts by Dutch children, makes automatic quantitative research to
Dutch spelling errors for the first time possible.
The topic of this thesis emerged from work that I did during my internship at the Centre for
Language and Speech Technology. Here, I detected reading errors automatically, by aligning what
a subject should read and actually read. From here, it is a small step to detecting spelling errors
by aligning the original version of a written text with its corrected version. I am happy that in this
thesis I was able to apply the knowledge of artificial intelligence, that I acquired during my studies,
in the field of language and education, where I am interested in.
In the first place, I wrote this thesis to meet the graduation requirements of my master’s degree
in Artificial Intelligence. However, in retrospect, this thesis brought me so much more than only
my diploma. Putting into practice all the knowledge and skills that I learned during my studies,
made me realize that I am capable of doing much more than I ever thought. In this way, problems
that seem unsolvable in the beginning, turned out to be solvable in the end. In addition, I wrote
this thesis in a difficult time, during the COVID-19 pandemic. On one hand, writing a thesis is a
good activity while you have to stay at home because of intelligent, partial and full lockdowns. On
the other hand, life outside my studies became quite boring and lonely. Happily, I have really great
parents, brothers, a sister, friends and housemates that supported me during this crisis. I would
like to thank them a lot, without them writing this thesis would have been much more difficult.
In addition, I would also like to thank my supervisor, Helmer Strik, for guiding me in my
research. He gave me the space to carry out this research project autonomously and in my own
way, but also gave help quickly when I asked for it. Furthermore, he offered me the opportunity to
publish my research at conferences. This resulted in a paper for the EduLearn21 conference and a
poster for the CLIN31 meeting. Writing this paper and poster were great experiences from which
I learned a lot. Catia Cucciarini helped me with this writing process and I would like to thank her
for that. In addition, I also got the opportunity to discuss my research with two spelling experts,
Martine Gijssel and Ronja Laarmann-Quante. I would like to thank them for making time to meet
me and answering my questions.
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Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen