Introduction

 “a technique that enables the computer to

encode complex grammatical knowledge
such as humans use to assemble sentences,
recognize errors and make corrections”
 CALL
 Hardcoded instructions
 Pre-configured assessment items
 Pre-specified mapping between learner response
and error category
 ICALL
 Adaptive instructions
 Dynamic assessment item generation
 Automated mapping using NLP techniques
 CALL
 Teacher centric rather than learner centric
 Explosion in learner responses  Explicit learner response
to error mapping not feasible
 Highly constrained learner responses
 Not sufficient for self-learning
 ICALL
 Abstract away from specific string entered by learner to
more general classes of properties
 Generation of feedback, learner modeling, instructional
sequencing can be based on small number of abstract
properties
 NLP systems are not robust
 Feedback
Feedback Designer

Response Learner
Student NLP LM
Modeling

Instructional
Instruction
Sequencing

Tutoring System
 In form-focused ICALL, the interaction workflow
proceeds as follows:
 In response to some prompt or question by the tutor,
the student enters a sentence
 The sentence is forwarded to the parser for analysis
of syntax validity
 The sentence passes the syntax validity check or
 The parser will fail in case the learner response is ill-
formed
 The error is classified into generic error classes
 The error handler generate appropriate feedback to
be presented to the learner.
 Tutoring subsystem  moderation of parser
output
 withholding information
 alerting the student that something is wrong
 highlighting the location of errors
 classifying the errors
 correction or hint on errors
 showing the structural analysis of the sentence
 assign score against the learner response
 revisiting instruction sequence dynamically
 update student model
 Vocabulary learning

 Diagnosis of learner error

 Correcting learner errors

 Language learning exercise generation

 The task
 Given a learner provided response, mark the
errors
 Need to parse learner response
 Erroneous sentences are ill-formed
 Parsers expects the input sentence to be well-
formed.
 Parsers should show tolerance to error
 Overgenerate and rank
 Imposing ranking constraints on grammatical
rule violation
 Mal-rules to allow parsing with specific errors
 Parse fitting
 Generate fragmented parse trees and try to fit
them together
 Do not allow analysis of completely arbitrary
ungrammatical input
 Issues with English Language Learners (ELL)
 Concentration of errors are much higher than
native learners.
 Using proofreading tools (e.g. MS Word)?
▪ Designed for native users
▪ Not very robust against foreign learner errors
▪ Targeted errors are small subset of learner errors
 Error correction in machine translation output
 Data driven approach
 Classification approach
▪ Whether an article will be followed by a noun?
▪ Whether an article appearing before noun is correct?
▪ What would be the correct article?
 Language modelling approach
▪ Errors will most likely be located in the area with low LM
score
 A hybrid system?
 Influence of L1
 No equivalent for a feature.
▪ Japanese and Russians face difficulty in learning articles
 Languages sharing features
▪ German and French learners find it easy to learn English
article systems
 Transfer problem
▪ Positive transfer
▪ Negative transfer
 Spelling errors

 Article usage

 Preposition usage

 Collocation errors
 Negative transfer
 Correspondence between prepositions of any two
languages is many-to-many
 घर पर  at home, सड़क पर  on the road
 Prepositions imposes semantic variation
 in the summer vs. during the summer
 Argument of predicates
 Nomilalization (removal of hazard vs remove the hazard)
 Type of argument (book in the box vs book on the table)
 Verb alteration (They loaded hay on the wagon vs They
loaded the wagon with hay)
 Phrasal Verbs (verb+particle)
 Non-compositional
 give vs give up
 Particles can move (put the switch off)
 Phrasal verbs often used with prepositions (give in
to their demands)
 Idioms (in the house vs on the house)
This is Kalyani in the house with all your All the drinks were on the house
favourite tunes
“in the house”  venue “On the house”  free
 Indefinite article depends on countability of
nouns
 Countable vs uncountable
▪ The price of a Spring Fest hoody is Rs. 700.
▪ The price of freedom is constant vigilance.
 Syntactic
 Some uncountable nouns can take indefinite
article when attached with a preposition phrase (a
knowledge of English)
 Learner Error Corpora

 Grammatical Error Detection

 Grammatical Error Correction

 Evaluation of Error Detection/Correction

System