by Kevin Hartnet 
The Boston Globe, August 23, 2016

Excerpt:

"At the end of July, researchers from the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines at MIT released a major new resource for the study of an often overlooked variety of language: English spoken by non-native speakers. It comes in the form of a database called the Treebank of Learner English that catalogues all the grammatical idiosyncrasies found in 5,000 English-language sentences written by people who don’t speak English as their first language.

The creators of the Treebank anticipate it will provide a platform for the study of learner English and also make it easier to develop technology like better search engines that supports non-native speakers. “Most people in the world that speak English speak English as a second language, yet at the same time, when we look at the scientific study of the English language, it’s mostly based on text produced by native speakers,” says Yevgeni Berzak, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science who led the project."