Automatic Correction of Adverb Placement Errors for CALL

According to recent studies, there is a persistence of adverb placement errors in the written productions of francophone learners and users of English at an intermediate to advanced level. In this paper, we present strategies for the automatic detection and correction of errors in the placement of manner adverbs, using linguistic-based natural language processing (NLP) techniques in the platform. Feedback messages are generated as a complement to corrections. We use grammatical information as well as the results of grammaticality judgement tests performed by native English speakers in order to predict correct positions for manner adverbs used as verb phrase (VP) modifiers or clause adjuncts. Detection and correction strategies are based on detection patterns and rewriting rules. The system has a precision of 87.23%, and a recall of 79.61% on a corpus of learner productions and emails. We discuss these results and present the limits of the system. Finally, we introduce the protocol used for the generation of feedback messages.