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SUMMARY:Using Grammars in On-line Education: Automatic error correction to
  improve writing skills - Dan Flickinger\, CSLI\, Stanford University
DTSTART:20130617T110000Z
DTEND:20130617T120000Z
UID:TALK43218@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Ekaterina Kochmar
DESCRIPTION:Computational linguists who develop grammar implementations of
 ten begin with the motivation to encode their hypotheses about the particu
 lar structures and the general principles which illuminate the analysis of
  a given language. Often these hypotheses are tested either on naturally o
 ccurring text corpora\, or on systematically constructed test suites illus
 trating the range of linguistic phenomena under study\, including both wel
 l-formed and ill-formed example sentences. Since many applications that ma
 ke use of grammar implementations emphasize robustness of analysis over pr
 ecision\, it is nice for the grammarian to encounter an application where 
 precision is demanded. One such application can be found in online educati
 on courses designed to teach basic writing skills\, where students are giv
 en exercises in which they construct sentences whose grammaticality is the
 n judged by the system.\n\nIn this talk I draw on current work incorporati
 ng the English Resource Grammar (developed at CSLI) into an existing onlin
 e course for teaching sentence composition to elementary school students. 
 Adaptation of this linguistically informed grammar has involved both exten
 sions via so-called mal-rules\, as well as reductions in the grammar's cov
 erage via _masking_ to avoid unwanted ambiguity\, given the restricted voc
 abulary made available to the students for each exercise. While the implem
 entation currently focuses on judging syntactic well-formedness\, we have 
 also added some support for identifying semantic errors\, by testing the e
 quivalence of the semantic representation that the grammar assigns to the 
 student's sentence with that of a set of correct answers supplied for that
  exercise. I will conclude with a report on the efficacy of this approach 
 based on improvements in student scores year over year on state-administer
 ed end-of-year exams in one large urban school district where the EPGY wri
 ting course has been in use for several years.
LOCATION:FW11\, Computer Laboratory
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