Correcting semantic collocation errors with L1-induced paraphrases

Abstract

We present a novel approach for automatic collocation error correction in learner English which is based on paraphrases extracted from parallel corpora. Our key assumption is that collocation errors are often caused by semantic similarity in the first language (L1-language) of the writer. An analysis of a large corpus of annotated learner English confirms this assumption. We evaluate our approach on real-world learner data and show that L1-induced paraphrases outperform traditional approaches based on edit distance, homophones, and WordNet synonyms. © 2011 Association for Computational Linguistics.