Automatic Detection of Comma Splices

In English text, independent clauses should be demarcated with full-stops (periods), or linked together with conjunctions. Non-native speakers are often prone to linking them improperly with commas instead of conjunctions, producing comma splices. This paper describes a method to detect comma splices using Conditional Random Fields (CRF), with features derived from parse tree patterns. In experiments, our model achieved an average of 0.91 precision and 0.28 recall in detecting comma splices, significantly outperforming both a baseline model using only local features and a widely used commercial grammar checker.