Correction Detection and Error Type Selection as an ESL Educational Aid

Abstract

We present a classifier that discriminates between types of corrections made by teachers of English in student essays. We define a set of linguistically motivated feature templates for a log-linear classification model, train this classifier on sentence pairs extracted from the Cambridge Learner Corpus, and achieve 89% accuracy improving upon a 33% baseline. Furthermore, we incorporate our classifier into a novel application that takes as input a set of corrected essays that have been sentence aligned with their originals and outputs the individual corrections classified by error type. We report the F-Score of our implementation on this task.