A comparative evaluation of deep and shallow approaches to the automatic detection of common grammatical errors

This paper compares a deep and a shallow processing approach to the problem of classifying a sentence as grammatically wellformed or ill-formed. The deep processing approach uses the XLE LFG parser and English grammar: two versions are presented, one which uses the XLE directly to perform the classification, and another one which uses a decision tree trained on features consisting of the XLE’s output statistics. The shallow processing approach predicts grammaticality based on n-gram frequency statistics: we present two versions, one which uses frequency thresholds and one which uses a decision tree trained on the frequencies of the rarest n-grams in the input sentence. We find that the use of a decision tree improves on the basic approach only for the deep parser-based approach. We also show that combining both the shallow and deep decision tree features is effective. Our evaluation is carried out using a large test set of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. The ungrammatical test set is generated automatically by inserting grammatical errors into well-formed BNC sentences

The nature of written language deficits in children with SLI

Children with Speech and Language Impairment (SLI) have associated difficulties in reading decoding and reading comprehension. To date few research studies have examined the children's written language. The aim of the present study was to provide data, which would evaluate the nature and extent of the children?s difficulties with writing, and to investigate the relationship between oral and written language. Eleven children with SLI were identified, with a mean age of 11 (age range 9:8-12:1) and were compared with a group of children matched for chronological age (CA) mean age 11:2 (age range 10-12.3) and language age (LA), with a mean chronological age of 7:3 (age range 6-9:8). All groups completed a language measure, the Bus Story Test of Continuous Speech (Renfrew, 1985), a standardised measure of writing, the Picture Story Language Test (Myklebust, 1965), and a reading assessment, the Wechsler Objective Reading Dimensions (Rust, Golombok & Trickey, 1993). The writing assessment revealed that the SLI group wrote fewer words and produced proportionately more spelling and syntax errors than the CA group. There was no difference between the groups on a measure of the content of written language. The SLI group also produced proportionately more syntax errors than the LA group. The relationships between oral language, reading and writing differed for the three groups. The SLI group revealed specific difficulties in the omission of verbs and verbal morphology. The nature and extent of the children's written language problems are considered in the context of difficulties with spoken language

Wronging a Right: Generating Better Errors to Improve Grammatical Error Detection

Grammatical error correction, like other machine learning tasks, greatly benefits from large quantities of high quality training data, which is typically expensive to produce. While writing a program to automatically generate realistic grammatical errors would be difficult, one could learn the distribution of naturallyoccurring errors and attempt to introduce them into other datasets. Initial work on inducing errors in this way using statistical machine translation has shown promise; we investigate cheaply constructing synthetic samples, given a small corpus of human-annotated data, using an off-the-rack attentive sequence-to-sequence model and a straight-forward post-processing procedure. Our approach yields error-filled artificial data that helps a vanilla bi-directional LSTM to outperform the previous state of the art at grammatical error detection, and a previously introduced model to gain further improvements of over 5% $F_{0.5}$ score. When attempting to determine if a given sentence is synthetic, a human annotator at best achieves 39.39 $F_1$ score, indicating that our model generates mostly human-like instances.Comment: Accepted as a short paper at EMNLP 201

Component processes of early reading, spelling, and narrative writing skills in Turkish: a longitudinal study

The study examined: (a) the role of phonological, grammatical, and rapid automatized naming (RAN) skills in reading and spelling development; and (b) the component processes of early narrative writing skills. Fifty-seven Turkish-speaking children were followed from Grade 1 to Grade 2. RAN was the most powerful longitudinal predictor of reading speed and its effect was evident even when previous reading skills were taken into account. Broadly, the phonological and grammatical skills made reliable contributions to spelling performance but their effects were completely mediated by previous spelling skills. Different aspects of the narrative writing skills were related to different processing skills. While handwriting speed predicted writing fluency, spelling accuracy predicted spelling error rate. Vocabulary and working memory were the only reliable longitudinal predictors of the quality of composition content. The overall model, however, failed to explain any reliable variance in the structural quality of the composition

The effects of written languaging on new essay writing：a qualitative analysis

According to Swain（2006）, providing learners with the opportunity to language about or reflect on their developing linguistic knowledge in the course of L2 learning mediates L2 learning and development. In second language acquisition（SLA）research, languaging（e.g., collaborative dialogue, private speech）has been suggested as playing a crucial role in learning a second language（L2）. This study explored the effects of written languaging（ i.e., written self-explanations） about written corrective feedback provided on draft essays written by 24 Japanese learners of English. The effect of written languaging was assessed by new essay writing. The effect of written languaging in improving accuracy depended on error types such as articles and conditionals. In this article, I argue that L2 teachers may wish to ask their students to reflect, in diaries, journals, and portfolios, on the linguistic problems they have encountered during classroom activities