Correcting comma errors in learner essays, and restoring commas in newswire text

  • Authors:
  • Ross Israel;Joel Tetreault;Martin Chodorow

  • Affiliations:
  • Indiana University, Bloomington, IN;Educational Testing Service, Princeton, NJ;Hunter College of CUNY, New York, NY

  • Venue:
  • NAACL HLT '12 Proceedings of the 2012 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

While the field of grammatical error detection has progressed over the past few years, one area of particular difficulty for both native and non-native learners of English, comma placement, has been largely ignored. We present a system for comma error correction in English that achieves an average of 89% precision and 25% recall on two corpora of unedited student essays. This system also achieves state-of-the-art performance in the sister task of restoring commas in well-formed text. For both tasks, we show that the use of novel features which encode long-distance information improves upon the more lexically-driven features used in prior work.