Avalingua: Natural Language Processing for Automatic Error Detection

The objective of this article is to present an automatic tool for detecting and classifying grammatical errors in written language as well as to describe the evaluation protocol we have carried out to measure its performance on learner corpora. The tool was designed to detect and analyse the linguistic errors found in text essays, assess the writing proficiency, and propose solutions with the aim of improving the linguistic skills of students. It makes use of natural language processing and knowledge-rich linguistic resources. So far, the tool has been implemented for the Galician language. The system has been evaluated on two learner corpora reaching 91% precision and 65% recall (76% F-score) for the task of detecting different types of grammatical errors, including spelling, lexical and syntactic ones.

keywords: automated error detection, learner corpora, natural language processing, syntactic analysis, language assessment