Technology Overview

1. Articles Prepositions My hobby is the photography. The delegation left at in the morning. • Technology Overview • Today, there are more non-native speakers of English in the world than there are native English speakers. However, learning English is difficult and many of the conventions of the English language are hard to acquire for non-native speakers. • Although grammar checking software have been around for a long time, it mostly relies on manually written rules and does not achieve high accuracy yet. • We believe that statistical approaches based on machine-learning algorithmscan overcome this problem. Instead of having to specify the rules manually the algorithm learns the correction rulesfrom large collections of text examples. We take advantage of error-annotated learner data, such as the NUS Corpus of Learner English (NUCLE), and very large non-learner data, including the web, which contain more texts than any human can read in a lifetime. • Achievements • In the HOO 2012 shared task on preposition and determiner correction, the NUS system achieved the best result among 85 systems submitted by 14 teams including Educational Testing Service, University of Cambridge, University of Illinois, and NAIST. The submitted systems were evaluated by the shared task organizers on unseen test documents from the Cambridge FCE exam on how accurate they can correct preposition and determiner errors. • 4 US patents have been filed for our technology. • 5publications in premier conferences. • Our system outperforms 3 commercial grammar checking software packages in correction of articles and prepositions. • Technology • Beam-search decoding algorithm that searches through multiple corrected versions of the sentence to find the overall best corrected sentence. • Our technology offers a framework that can perform corrections of multiple and interacting error categories. Unnecessary article. Wrong preposition NUS Enterprise National University of Singapore 21 HengMuiKeng Terrace, Level 5, Singapore 119613 Email: iloquery@nus.edu.sg Telephone: +65 6516 7175 Fax: +65 6777 6990