A Hybrid Correction Method of English Grammar Error for Chinese Learners' Essays

Nowadays, English as a Second Language (ESL) learners in China often make errors in grammar while writing English essay. Different approaches to high-quality Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) have been proposed recently. Two typical approaches are rule-based method and statistical-based method when correcting grammatical errors in English essays. The former can't cover all grammar errors in English essays of ESL learners and this led to low accuracy when the former corrects grammar errors in English essays of ESL learners. In contrast, the latter uses statistical approaches to train English essays of ESL learners and get the knowledge of their grammatical errors. This paper proposes GEC method for Chinese English learners and a hybrid approach which combined statistical-based method and rule-based method to GEC. On the one hand, some rules are introduced to solve most of grammar errors, for instance, subject-verb agreement is more complicated and is more effective to determine the errors by linguistic and grammatical rules. On the other hand, the statistical-based method has the advantage in the correction of replacement preposition. The experiment shows that it is able to detect and correct many kinds of grammatical errors and obtained a higher F0.5 score for correction.