Towards Improved Grammatical Error Correction

Project Description

Grammatical error correction (GEC) deals with automatically correcting errors in written texts, including grammatical, spelling, punctuation, and word choice errors. Current GEC systems rely heavily on annotated corpora for learning, where human teachers have manually identified and corrected the errors in texts written by learners. Since manually preparing the training corpora is laborious and time-consuming, we will explore semi-supervised or unsupervised learning approaches to reduce this dependence. We will also explore generating more helpful and customized feedback to enable learners to more effectively learn to improve their writing.

Research Technical Area

  • Natural language processing
 

Benefits to the society

The grammatical error correction algorithms developed in this project provide useful feedback to learners of English to improve their writing, which is beneficial to hundreds of millions of English learners worldwide.

Project’s Publications

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Team’s Principal Investigator

Professor Ng Hwee Tou

National University of Singapore

Professor Ng Hwee Tou is Provost’s Chair Professor of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and a Senior Faculty Member at the NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, USA. His research focuses on natural language processing and information retrieval. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).

 

Recent Notable Awards

  • Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2012
  • Best Paper Award, 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2011)