An English Grammar Checker as a Writing Aid for Students of English as a Second Language

This paper describes an implemented on-line English grammar checker for students of English as a second language. This system focuses on a limited category of frequently occurring grammatical mistakes in essays written by students in the English Language Programs at the University of X. The grammar checker exploits the syntactic domain of locality from a Combina-tory Categorial Grammar for the purpose of identifying speciic types of grammatical mistakes as well as accepting grammatical expressions. It includes grammatical mistakes as ungrammatical variations of the constituents that can be related to given lexical entries in a categorial lexicon. The grammar checker is developed using one set of essays and tested against another set of essays. Unpredicted grammatical mistakes are either incorporated into the next revision or left as they are, depending on the diiculty and desirability of detecting them. The system also provides an interactive Internet interface for convenience of use. Finally, we discuss issues of constructing a full-scale English lexicon for an educational domain.