Exploiting learners' tendencies for detecting english determiner errors

Abstract

This paper proposes a method for detecting determiner errors, which are highly frequent in learner English. To augment conventional methods, the proposed method exploits a strong tendency displayed by learners in determiner usage, i.e., mistakenly omitting determiners most of the time. Its basic idea is simple and applicable to almost any conventional method. This paper combines this idea with countability prediction, which outperforms the conventional methods, achieving an F-measure of 0.613. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.