A Light Rule-based Approach to English Subject-Verb Agreement Errors on the Third Person Singular Forms

Verb errors are one of the most common grammar errors made by non-native writers of English. This work especially focus on an important type of verb usage errors, subject-verb agreement for the third person singular forms, which has a high proportion in errors made by non-native English learners. Existing work has not given a satisfied solution for this task, in which those using supervised learning method usually fail to output good enough performance, and rule-based methods depend on advanced linguistic resources such as syntactic parsers. In this paper, we propose a rule-based method to detect and correct the concerned errors. The proposed method relies on a series of rules to automatically locate subject and predicate in four types of sentences. The evaluation shows that the proposed method gives state-of-the-art performance with quite limited linguistic resources. ∗ Correspondence author † This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61170114, and No. 61272248), the National Basic Research Program of China (No. 2013CB329401), the Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality (No. 13511500200), the European Union Seventh Framework Program (No. 247619), the Cai Yuanpei Program (CSC fund 201304490199 and 201304490171), and the art and science interdiscipline funds of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, No. 14X190040031, and the Key Project of National Society Science Foundation of China, No. 15-ZDA041.