Correcting grammatical verb errors

Alla Rozovskaya, Dan Roth, Vivek Srikumar

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Verb errors are some of the most common mistakes made by non-native writers of English but some of the least studied. The reason is that dealing with verb errors requires a new paradigm; essentially all research done on correcting grammatical errors assumes a closed set of triggers - e.g., correcting the use of prepositions or articles - but identifying mistakes in verbs necessitates identifying potentially ambiguous triggers first, and then determining the type of mistake made and correcting it. Moreover, once the verb is identified, modeling verb errors is challenging because verbs fulfill many grammatical functions, resulting in a variety of mistakes. Consequently, the little earlier work done on verb errors assumed that the error type is known in advance. We propose a linguistically-motivated approach to verb error correction that makes use of the notion of verb finiteness to identify triggers and types of mistakes, before using a statistical machine learning approach to correct these mistakes. We show that the linguistically-informed model significantly improves the accuracy of the verb correction approach.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication14th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2014, EACL 2014
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages358-367
Number of pages10
ISBN (Print)9781632663962
DOIs
StatePublished - 2014
Event14th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2014, EACL 2014 - Gothenburg, Sweden
Duration: Apr 26 2014Apr 30 2014

Publication series

Name14th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2014, EACL 2014

Other

Other14th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2014, EACL 2014
Country/TerritorySweden
CityGothenburg
Period4/26/144/30/14

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software

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