Exploring Reusability and Reproducibility for a Research Infrastructure for L1 and L2 Learner Corpora

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I think this is a very interesting and innovative topic. The paper provides a rigourous theoretical background, clear objectives, results and conclusions. 

Author Response

The reviewer did not provide any points that should be changed and we therefore did not act on it.

Reviewer 2 Report

Usability and reusability of corpora with written production by L1 speakers and L2 learners is discussed. 

However, it is not clear what kind of paper the authors are submitting. Should it be classified as a survey, or a best-practices papers?  I can hardly find an applicative solution, or a tool/architecture that may solve the problems arisen by the authors.

An additional problem with this paper is the quality of presentation. The paper is difficult to read: objectives and methods are defined after a too long introduction. All relevant background information are there, though amid too many details defined with too many words.

As a general comment, the English style should be thoroughly revised. The are too long sentences, with a punctuation requiring some revisions.

In section 2, it is not clear to me why you are starting from IAL. Is it your affiliation? It seems it is not. Maybe some information are needed to be added, in this case. Why not simply referring to the corpora? 

In the Results section, I cannot find any results. I can only read the output of a check of a number of available corpora: their pros and contras. 

Which is your original contribution to the L1-L2 corpora research community? 

I think that starting from this fundamental research question, the manuscript should be totally revised and re-conceptualised. 

As follows, a few details about odd syntactic structures (to give the authors a couple of examples):

line 1-5: this is a unique sentence and it is definitively too long. I suggest you to modify in "Research in various educational and linguistic domains such as learner corpus research, writing research or second language acquisition has brought forward a substantial amount of research data in the form of L1 and L2 learner corpora. The multitude of individual solutions combined with domain-inherent obstacles in data sharing have so far hampered comparability, reusability and reproducibility of data and research results. " 

line 25: novice -> novices

line 50:  ..other non-fully proficient productions by native speakers -> (written) production by L1 developmental speakers 

line 58-65: once again this is a unique sentence. Too long!

line 161-163: unclear. both what? Immediately after "both" you should place the two arguments you are referring to.

line 488-491: which one is the subject of this long sentence?

Author Response

please see attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper is not that significant on a scientific and originality point of view. 
However, it offers a nice overview on the topic.
The authors should consider to extend the discussion bearing in mind that often a comparative view of the approaches should be given in order to elict one in particular, or at least some of its features

Author Response

We revised the discussion part extensively to accommodate the reviewer's comments.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I do appreciate the huge effort done by the authors in revising the manuscript.

This version is structured in a more clear way, so that it is actually clear what kind of paper it is.

My only concern is about the linguistic/syntactic style which is, in some periods, difficult and far from a standard English one. This makes the reading sometimes difficult, with a potential loss of focus.

Here as follows, I give some examples and suggestions:

- line 10: Moreover has a negative appeal. I suggest you to replace with “In addition, “

• line 37: corpora, of texts or utterances. Remove comma.
• lines 39-43: it is a bit complex. Here is my suggestion: Corpora depicting language production by non native speakers in a second (or third) language are called learners corpora, with an entire field specialised on ...
• lines 60-63: I suggest: .. between research focussed on L2 learner corpora and research focussed on student essays ... (L1), remove “so far”, the steeps and tools ...
• line 77: ? in this way are the then ... ???
• line 89: On the other hand... where is “on the one hand”? Maybe better “In addition”
• line 172: ... (see 3.1). Full stop here. Additionally, we make some considerations ...
• line 205: check footnote 14. It displays an error.
• line 409: add a comma behind platforms
• line 514: with the need ... —> , which require to process new data over again, 
• line 731: As already stated
• line 732: spending ... replace with “, which require considerable amounts ...”
• line 754: we could create —> we proposed an ...
• line 772-773: In this perspective, ..., an even higher aware for ..., and a stronger commitment to ..., are needed.
• line 779: The solution we propose .... can ..
• line 787: In the research community as a whole it is widely agreed that ... (inverse order and removed “upon”)
• line 801: .. more or less in the same
• way

Author Response

see attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx