Recognizing Article Errors in the Writing of Japanese Learners of English

摘要

In this paper, the authors propose a method to recognize article errors often seen in English text written by Japanese learners of English. In this method, article errors are recognized based on the statistic extracted from an electronic corpus such as English-language newspapers. The authors' method is different from earlier methods in that there is no need to create a dictionary or rules for article error recognition. The results of experiments confirm that the performance of the authors' method is equivalent or superior to earlier methods (F - measure = 0.76). In addition, the authors' method is shown to be superior to earlier methods insofar as (1) the effort to create a dictionary or rules is not needed; (2) there are no limits on the input text; and (3) the ratio of Recall to Precision can be adjusted.