From keystrokes to annotated process data: Enriching the output of Inputlog with linguistic information

Keystroke logging tools are a valuable aid to monitor written language production. These tools record all keystrokes, including backspaces and deletions together with timing information. In this paper we report on an extension to the keystroke logging program Inputlog in which we aggregate the logged process data from the keystroke (character) level to the word level. The logged process data are further enriched with different kinds of linguistic information: part-of-speech tags, lemmata, chunk boundaries, syllable boundaries and word frequency. A dedicated parser has been developed that distils from the logged process data word-level revisions, deleted fragments and final product data. The linguistically-annotated output will facilitate the linguistic analysis of the logged data and will provide a valuable basis for more linguistically-oriented writing process research. The set-up of the extension to Inputlog is largely language-independent. As proof-of-concept, the extension has been developed for English and Dutch. Inputlog is freely available for research purposes.