Automatic detection and correction of discourse marker errors made by Spanish native speakers in Portuguese academic writing

摘要

Discourse markers are words and expressions (such as: firstly, then, for example, because, as a result, likewise, in comparison, in contrast) that explicitly state the relational structure of the information in the text, i.e. signalling a sequential relationship between the current message and the previous discourse. Using these markers improves the cohesion and coherence of texts, facilitating reading comprehension. Although often included in tools that support the rhetoric structuring of texts, discourse markers have hardly been explored in writing support tools for learners of a second language. However, learners of a second language, including those at advanced levels, have trouble producing these lexical items, frequently replacing them with items from their native language or with literal translations of items in their own language, which often do not result in proper lexical items in the second language. In addition, students learn a single marker per function and use it repeatedly, producing monotonous texts. With the aim of contributing to reducing these difficulties, this paper presents a lexicon that will be used to support the task of automatically detecting and correcting discourse marker errors. Several heuristics have been evaluated to generate different types of errors. Automatic translation methods were used to semi-automatically compile the lexicon used in these heuristics. Similarity measures were also combined with these heuristics to correct discourse marker errors. The evaluated methods proved to be suitable for the task of identifying some types of discourse marker errors and can potentially identify many others, as long as new lexical inputs are incorporated into them.