We present a method for lexical simplification. Simplification rules are learned from a comparable corpus, and the rules are applied in a context-aware fashion to input sentences. Our method is unsupervised. Furthermore, it does not require any alignment or correspondence among the complex and simple corpora. We evaluate the simplification according to three criteria: preservation of grammatica...

Heavy-NP shift occurs when speakers prefer placing lengthy or “heavy” noun phrase direct objects in the clause-final position within a sentence rather than in the post-verbal position. Two experiments were conducted in this study, and their results suggested that having a long noun phrase affected the ordering of constituents (the noun phrase and prepositional phrase) by advanced Iranian EFL le...

The present study sought to investigate the acquisition of referential, quasi and expletive subject pronouns, three different types of obligatory subjects in English, by adult Persian speaking L2 learners of English at different stages of L2 acquisition. A Grammaticality Judgment Test and a Translation Test were designed and developed to elicit the participants' knowledge of obligatory subjects...

This quasi-experimental study set out to examine the effect of peer corrective feedback on feedback givers and receivers in L2 writing. The forms in focus were a/an, the, and the past tense.The study was conducted in an EFL classroom setting with 45 learners of English in three writing classes which served as the feedback givers, receivers, and the control group.  Over four sessions of treatmen...

Automated methods for identifying whether sentences are grammatical have various potential applications (e.g., machine translation, automated essay scoring, computer-assisted language learning). In this work, we construct a statistical model of grammaticality using various linguistic features (e.g., misspelling counts, parser outputs, n-gram language model scores). We also present a new publicl...

Prior work has shown the utility of syntactic tree fragments as features in judging the grammaticality of text. To date such fragments have been extracted from derivations of Bayesianinduced Tree Substitution Grammars (TSGs). Evaluating on discriminative coarse and fine grammaticality classification tasks, we show that a simple, deterministic, count-based approach to fragment identification per...

The paper presents a novel sentence trimmer in Japanese, which combines a non-statistical yet generic tree generation model and Conditional Random Fields (CRFs), to address improving the grammaticality of compression while retaining its relevance. Experiments found that the present approach outperforms in grammaticality and in relevance a dependency-centric approach (Oguro et al., 2000; Morooka...

Machine-produced text often lacks grammaticality and fluency. This paper studies grammaticality improvement using a syntax-based algorithm based on CCG. The goal of the search problem is to find an optimal parse tree among all that can be constructed through selection and ordering of the input words. The search problem, which is significantly harder than parsing, is solved by guided learning fo...

s Die Transferforschung befasst sich mit der Untersuchung des interlingualen Einflusses, insbesondere beim Erwerb weiterer Fremdsprachen (Tertiärsprachen) zum Tragen kommt. hier vorliegende Studie untersucht den Position von Objektpronomen bei Lernenden Deutsch als L3. Dafür bearbeiteten mäßig fortgeschrittene und Deutschlernende – zwei Gruppen L1 Rumänisch, L2 Englisch, eine Gruppe Französisch...