ELQA: A Corpus of Metalinguistic Questions and Answers about English

Shabnam Behzad, Keisuke Sakaguchi, Nathan Schneider, Amir Zeldes

Main: Resources and Evaluation Main-poster Paper

Poster Session 3: Resources and Evaluation (Poster)
Conference Room: Frontenac Ballroom and Queen's Quay
Conference Time: July 11, 09:00-10:30 (EDT) (America/Toronto)
Global Time: July 11, Poster Session 3 (13:00-14:30 UTC)
Keywords: language resources, nlp datasets
TLDR: We present ELQA, a corpus of questions and answers in and about the English language. Collected from two online forums, the >70k questions (from English learners and others) cover wide-ranging topics including grammar, meaning, fluency, and etymology. The answers include descriptions of general prop...
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Abstract: We present ELQA, a corpus of questions and answers in and about the English language. Collected from two online forums, the >70k questions (from English learners and others) cover wide-ranging topics including grammar, meaning, fluency, and etymology. The answers include descriptions of general properties of English vocabulary and grammar as well as explanations about specific (correct and incorrect) usage examples. Unlike most NLP datasets, this corpus is metalinguistic---it consists of language about language. As such, it can facilitate investigations of the metalinguistic capabilities of NLU models, as well as educational applications in the language learning domain. To study this, we define a free-form question answering task on our dataset and conduct evaluations on multiple LLMs (Large Language Models) to analyze their capacity to generate metalinguistic answers.