Automated Suggestions for Miscollocations

One of the most common and persistent error types in second language writing is collocation errors, such as learn knowledge instead of gain or acquire knowledge, or make damage rather than cause damage. In this work-in-progress report, we propose a probabilistic model for suggesting corrections to lexical collocation errors. The probabilistic model incorporates three features: word association strength (MI), semantic similarity (via Word-Net) and the notion of shared collocations (or intercollocability). The results suggest that the combination of all three features outperforms any single feature or any combination of two features.