Correcting Preposition Errors in Learner English Using Error Case Frames and Feedback Messages

Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 754–764, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, June 23-25 2014. c⃝2014 Association for Computational Linguistics Correcting Preposition Errors in Learner English Using Error Case Frames and Feedback Messages Ryo Nagata1∗ Mikko Vilenius2 Edward Whittaker3 1Konan University / Kobe, Japan 2The Japan Institute for Educational Measurement, Inc. / Tokyo, Japan 3Inferret Limited / Northampton, England nagata-acl @ hyogo-u.ac.jp. Abstract This paper presents a novel framework called error case frames for correcting preposition errors. They are case frames specially designed for describing and cor- recting preposition errors. Their most dis- tinct advantage is that they can correct er- rors with feedback messages explaining why the preposition is erroneous. This pa- per proposes a method for automatically generating them by comparing learner and native corpora. Experiments show (i) au- tomatically generated error case frames achieve a performance comparable to con- ventional methods; (ii) error case frames are intuitively interpretable and manually modifiable to improve them; (iii) feedback messages provided by error case frames are effective in language learning assis- tance. Considering these advantages and the fact that it has been difficult to provide feedback messages by automatically gen- erated rules, error case frames will likely be one of the major approaches for prepo- sition error correction. 1 Introduction This paper presents a novel framework for correct- ing preposition errors. Its most significant advan- tage over previous methods is that it can provide learners with feedback messages, that is, explana- tory notes describing why the detected preposi- tion is erroneous and should be corrected as in- dicated, as shown in Fig. 1. Despite the fact that appropriate feedback messages are essential in language learning assistance (Ferris and Roberts, 2001; Robb et al., 1986), which is one of the im- mediate applications of grammatical error correc- ∗Part of this work was performed while the author was a visiting researcher at LIMSI, Orsay (France). Target sentence: In the univerysity, I studied English in the morning. Error Error Error Error: : : : correct preposition correct preposition correct preposition correct preposition at at at at Feedback message: Though both at and in are prepositions of place, at is used to denote the place (university) to which the person belongs and where the learning activities take place. Target sentence: When the day is holiday, I go to shopping, singing in Karaoke and talking in cafe. Error Error Error Error: : : : remove remove remove remove to to to to Feedback message: Go directly takes the activity without a preposition when it means traveling to a place in order to take part in an activity by go and ～ing, e.g., I went shopping. Similar expressions: go swimming, go fishing, go sightseeing Figure 1: Error correction and feedback messages provided by the proposed method. tion, almost all previous methods are incapable of providing feedback messages. Grammatical error correction has been inten- sively studied in recent years. Current methods mostly exploit machine learning-based classifiers to correct target errors; examples are …

Content truncated to 500 words