Automatic grammar correction for second-language learners

Abstract

A computer conversational system can potentially help a foreign-language student improve his/her fluency through practice dialogues. One of its potential roles could be to correct ungrammatical sentences. This paper 1 describes our research on a sentence-level, generation-based approach to grammar correction: first, a word lattice of candidate corrections is generated from an ill-formed input. A traditional n-gram language model is used to produce a small set of N-best candidates, which are then reranked by parsing using a stochastic context-free grammar. We evaluate this approach in a flight domain with simulated ill-formed sentences. We discuss its potential applications in a few related tasks. Index Terms: computer-assisted language learning, dialogue systems, natural language generation.