The world’s languages exhibit certain so-called typological or implicational universals; for example, Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) languages typically use postpositions. Explaining the source of such biases is a key goal of linguistics.We study word-order universals through a computational simulation with language models (LMs).Our experiments show that typologically-typical word orders tend to have lower perplexity estimated by LMs with cognitively plausible biases: syntactic biases, specific parsing strategies, and memory limitations. This suggests that the interplay of cognitive biases and predictability (perplexity) can explain many aspects of word-order universals.It also showcases the advantage of cognitively-motivated LMs, typically employed in cognitive modeling, in the simulation of language universals.

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) is the task of automatically detecting and correcting errors in text. The task not only includes the correction of grammatical errors, such as missing prepositions and mismatched subject–verb agreement, but also orthographic and semantic errors, such as misspellings and word choice errors, respectively. The field has seen significant progress in the last decade, motivated in part by a series of five shared tasks, which drove the development of rule-based methods, statistical classifiers, statistical machine translation, and finally neural machine translation systems, which represent the current dominant state of the art. In this survey paper, we condense the field into a single article and first outline some of the linguistic challenges of the task, introduce the most popular datasets that are available to researchers (for both English and other languages), and summarize the various methods and techniques that have been developed with a particular focus on artificial error generation. We next describe the many different approaches to evaluation as well as concerns surrounding metric reliability, especially in relation to subjective human judgments, before concluding with an overview of recent progress and suggestions for future work and remaining challenges. We hope that this survey will serve as a comprehensive resource for researchers who are new to the field or who want to be kept apprised of recent developments.

In this work, we systematically investigate how well current models of coherence can capture aspects of text implicated in discourse organisation. We devise two datasets of various linguistic alterations that undermine coherence and test model sensitivity to changes in syntax and semantics. We furthermore probe discourse embedding space and examine the knowledge that is encoded in representations of coherence. We hope this study shall provide further insight into how to frame the task and improve models of coherence assessment further. Finally, we make our datasets publicly available as a resource for researchers to use to test discourse coherence models.

Automating the assessment of learner summary provides a useful tool for assessing learner reading comprehension. We present a summarization task for evaluating non-native reading comprehension and propose three novel approaches to automatically assess the learner summaries. We evaluate our models on two datasets we created and show that our models outperform traditional approaches that rely on exact word match on this task. Our best model produces quality assessments close to professional examiners.

This paper reports on the BEA-2019 Shared Task on Grammatical Error Correction (GEC). As with the CoNLL-2014 shared task, participants are required to correct all types of errors in test data. One of the main contributions of the BEA-2019 shared task is the introduction of a new dataset, the Write&Improve+LOCNESS corpus, which represents a wider range of native and learner English levels and abilities. Another contribution is the introduction of tracks, which control the amount of annotated data available to participants. Systems are evaluated in terms of ERRANT F_0.5, which allows us to report a much wider range of performance statistics. The competition was hosted on Codalab and remains open for further submissions on the blind test set.

We demonstrate that current state-of-the-art approaches to Automated Essay Scoring (AES) are not well-suited to capturing adversarially crafted input of grammatical but incoherent sequences of sentences. We develop a neural model of local coherence that can effectively learn connectedness features between sentences, and propose a framework for integrating and jointly training the local coherence model with a state-of-the-art AES model. We evaluate our approach against a number of baselines and experimentally demonstrate its effectiveness on both the AES task and the task of flagging adversarial input, further contributing to the development of an approach that strengthens the validity of neural essay scoring models.

Since the end of the CoNLL-2014 shared task on grammatical error correction (GEC), research into language model (LM) based approaches to GEC has largely stagnated. In this paper, we re-examine LMs in GEC and show that it is entirely possible to build a simple system that not only requires minimal annotated data (∼1000 sentences), but is also fairly competitive with several state-of-the-art systems. This approach should be of particular interest for languages where very little annotated training data exists, although we also hope to use it as a baseline to motivate future research.

Some language exams have multiple writing tasks. When a learner writes multiple texts in a language exam, it is not surprising that the quality of these texts tends to be similar, and the existing automated text scoring (ATS) systems do not explicitly model this similarity. In this paper, we suggest that it could be useful to include the other texts written by this learner in the same exam as extra references in an ATS system. We propose various approaches of fusing information from multiple tasks and pass this authorship knowledge into our ATS model on six different datasets. We show that this can positively affect the model performance at a global level.

We propose a novel word embedding pre-training approach that exploits writing errors in learners’ scripts. We compare our method to previous models that tune the embeddings based on script scores and the discrimination between correct and corrupt word contexts in addition to the generic commonly-used embeddings pre-trained on large corpora. The comparison is achieved by using the aforementioned models to bootstrap a neural network that learns to predict a holistic score for scripts. Furthermore, we investigate augmenting our model with error corrections and monitor the impact on performance. Our results show that our error-oriented approach outperforms other comparable ones which is further demonstrated when training on more data. Additionally, extending the model with corrections provides further performance gains when data sparsity is an issue.

Shortage of available training data is holding back progress in the area of automated error detection. This paper investigates two alternative methods for artificially generating writing errors, in order to create additional resources. We propose treating error generation as a machine translation task, where grammatically correct text is translated to contain errors. In addition, we explore a system for extracting textual patterns from an annotated corpus, which can then be used to insert errors into grammatically correct sentences. Our experiments show that the inclusion of artificially generated errors significantly improves error detection accuracy on both FCE and CoNLL 2014 datasets.

Until now, error type performance for Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) systems could only be measured in terms of recall because system output is not annotated. To overcome this problem, we introduce ERRANT, a grammatical ERRor ANnotation Toolkit designed to automatically extract edits from parallel original and corrected sentences and classify them according to a new, dataset-agnostic, rule-based framework. This not only facilitates error type evaluation at different levels of granularity, but can also be used to reduce annotator workload and standardise existing GEC datasets. Human experts rated the automatic edits as “Good” or “Acceptable” in at least 95% of cases, so we applied ERRANT to the system output of the CoNLL-2014 shared task to carry out a detailed error type analysis for the first time.

We propose a new method of automatically extracting learner errors from parallel English as a Second Language (ESL) sentences in an effort to regularise annotation formats and reduce inconsistencies. Specifically, given an original and corrected sentence, our method first uses a linguistically enhanced alignment algorithm to determine the most likely mappings between tokens, and secondly employs a rule-based function to decide which alignments should be merged. Our method beats all previous approaches on the tested datasets, achieving state-of-the-art results for automatic error extraction.

We have integrated the RASP system with the UIMA framework (RASP4UIMA) and used this to parse the XML-encoded version of the British National Corpus (BNC). All original annotation is preserved, and parsing information, mainly in the form of grammatical relations, is added in an XML format. A few specific adaptations of the system to give better results with the BNC are discussed briefly. The RASP4UIMA system is publicly available and can be used to parse other corpora or document collections, and the final parsed version of the BNC will be deposited with the Oxford Text Archive.

We introduce a large computational subcategorizationlexicon which includes subcategorization frame (SCF) and frequencyinformation for 6,397 English verbs. This extensive lexicon was acquiredautomatically from five corpora and the Web using the current version of the comprehensive subcategorization acquisition system of Briscoe and Carroll (1997). The lexicon is provided freely for research use, along with a script which can be used to filter and build sub-lexicons suited for different natural languageprocessing (NLP) purposes. Documentation is also provided whichexplains each sub-lexicon option and evaluates its accuracy.

We describe an approach to robust domain-independent syntactic parsing of unrestricted naturally-occurring (English) input. The technique involves parsing sequences of part-of-speech and punctuation labels using a unification-based grammar coupled with a probabilistic LR parser. We describe the coverage of several corpora using this grammar and report the results of a parsing experiment using probabilities derived from bracketed training data. We report the first substantial experiments to assess the contribution of punctuation to deriving an accurate syntactic analysis, by parsing identical texts both with and without naturally-occurring punctuation marks.