Correcting Comma Errors in Learner Essays, and Restoring Commas in Newswire Text
Ross Israel, Joel Tetreault, Martin S. Chodorow · 2012
While the field of grammatical error detection has progressed over the past few years, one area of particular difficulty for both native and non-native learners of English, comma placement, has been largely ignored. We present a system for comma error correction in English that achieves an average of 89 % precision and 25 % recall on two corpora of unedited student essays. This system also achieves state-of-theart performance in the sister task of restoring commas in well-formed text. For both tasks, we show that the use of novel features which encode long-distance information improves upon the more lexically-driven features used in prior work. 1