The Illinois-Columbia System in the CoNLL-2014 Shared Task

The CoNLL-2014 shared task is an extension of last year’s shared task and focuses on correcting grammatical errors in essays written by non-native learners of English. In this paper, we describe the Illinois-Columbia system that participated in the shared task. Our system ranked second on the original annotations and first on the revised annotations. The core of the system is based on the University of Illinois model that placed first in the CoNLL-2013 shared task. This baseline model has been improved and expanded for this year’s competition in several respects. We describe our underlying approach, which relates to our previous work, and describe the novel aspects of the system in more detail.

[1]  Raymond Hendy Susanto,et al.  The CoNLL-2014 Shared Task on Grammatical Error Correction , 2014 .

[2]  Hwee Tou Ng,et al.  Building a Large Annotated Corpus of Learner English: The NUS Corpus of Learner English , 2013, BEA@NAACL-HLT.

[3]  Dan Roth,et al.  Joint Learning and Inference for Grammatical Error Correction , 2013, EMNLP.

[4]  Robert Dale,et al.  HOO 2012: A Report on the Preposition and Determiner Error Correction Shared Task , 2012, BEA@NAACL-HLT.

[5]  Yoav Freund,et al.  Experiments with a New Boosting Algorithm , 1996, ICML.

[6]  Hwee Tou Ng,et al.  Better Evaluation for Grammatical Error Correction , 2012, NAACL.

[7]  Dan Roth,et al.  A Winnow-Based Approach to Context-Sensitive Spelling Correction , 1998, Machine Learning.

[8]  Dan Roth,et al.  The UI System in the HOO 2012 Shared Task on Error Correction , 2012, BEA@NAACL-HLT.

[9]  Adam Kilgarriff,et al.  Helping Our Own: The HOO 2011 Pilot Shared Task , 2011, ENLG.

[10]  Christopher D. Manning,et al.  Finding Contradictions in Text , 2008, ACL.

[11]  Dan Roth,et al.  The Use of Classifiers in Sequential Inference , 2001, NIPS.

[12]  Dan Roth,et al.  Algorithm Selection and Model Adaptation for ESL Correction Tasks , 2011, ACL.

[13]  Hwee Tou Ng,et al.  The CoNLL-2013 Shared Task on Grammatical Error Correction , 2013, CoNLL Shared Task.

[14]  Dan Roth,et al.  Correcting Grammatical Verb Errors , 2014, EACL.

[15]  Dan Roth,et al.  Scaling Up Context-Sensitive Text Correction , 2001, IAAI.

[16]  Dan Roth,et al.  The University of Illinois System in the CoNLL-2013 Shared Task , 2013, CoNLL Shared Task.