Automatic Detection of Preposition Errors in Learner Writing
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/cj.v26i3.512-528Keywords:
Preposition Errors, Automatic Error Detection, Preposition Usage, L2 EnglishAbstract
In this article, we present an approach to the automatic correction of preposition errors in L2 English. Our system, based on a maximum entropy classifier, achieves average precision of 42% and recall of 35% on this task. The discussion of results obtained on correct and incorrect data aims to establish what characteristics of L2 writing prove particularly problematic in this task.
References
Brants, T., & Franz, A. (2006). Web 1t 5-gram version 1. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium.
Burnard, L. (Ed.). (2000). The British national corpus users reference guide. Oxford: British National Corpus Consortium, Oxford University Computing Services.
Chodorow, M., Tetreault, J., & Han, N. (2007). Detection of grammatical errors involving prepositions. In F. Costello, J. Kelleher, & M. Volk (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on Prepositions (pp. 25-30). Prague, Czech Republic: Association for Computational Linguistics.
Clark, S., & Curran, J. (2007). Wide-coverage efficient statistical parsing with CCG and log-linear models. Computational Linguistics, 33, 493-552.
De Felice, R. (2008). Automatic error detection in non-native English. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Oxford University Computing Laboratory.
De Felice, R., & Pulman, S. (2008). A classifier-based approach to preposition and determiner error correction in L2 English. In Proceedings of COLING (pp. 169-176). Manchester, UK: Coling 2008 Organizing Committee. Retrieved April 20, 2009, from http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/C/C08
Gamon, M., Gao, J., Brockett, C., Klementiev, A., Dolan, W., Belenko, D., et al. (2008). Using contextual speller techniques and language modeling for ESL error correction. In Y. Matsumoto & A. Copestake (Eds.), Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (pp. 449-456). Hyderabad, India: Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing.
Granger, S. (1998). Prefabricated patterns in advanced EFL writing: Collocations and formulae. In A. Cowie (Ed.), Phraseology: Theory, analysis and applications (pp. 145-160). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Izumi, E., Uchimoto, K., & Isahara, H. (2004). SST speech corpus of Japanese learners’ English and automatic detection of learners’ errors. ICAME, 28, 31-48.
Lee, J., & Knutsson, O. (2008). The role of PP attachment in preposition generation. In A. Gelbukh (Ed.), Proceedings of CICling (pp. 643-658). Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer. Meunier, F. (1998). Computer tools for the analysis of learner corpora. In S. Granger (Ed.), Learner English on computer (pp. 19-37). London: Longman.
Minnen, G., Carroll, J., & Pearce, D. (2001). Applied morphological processing of English. Natural Language Engineering, 7, 207-223.
Nicholls, D. (2003). The Cambridge learner corpus—Error coding and analysis for lexicography. In D. Archer, P. Rayson, A. Wilson, & T. McEnery (Eds.), Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics 2003 Conference (pp. 572-581). Lancaster, UK: UCREL, Lancaster University.
Parrott, M. (2000). Grammar for English language teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tetreault, J., & Chodorow, M. (2008a). Native judgments of non-native usage: Experiments in preposition error detection. In Proceedings of the Coling 2008 Workshop on Human Judgments in Computational Linguistics (pp. 24-32). Manchester, UK: Coling 2008 Organizing Committee. Retrieved April 20, 2009, from http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/C/C08
Tetreault, J., & Chodorow, M. (2008b). The ups and downs of preposition error detection in ESL writing. In Proceedings of Coling (pp. 865-872). Manchester, UK: Coling 2008 Organizing Committee. Retrieved April 20, 2009, from http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/C/C08