Sentence correction incorporating relative position and parse template language models

Sentence correction has been an important emerging issue in computer-assisted language learning. However, existing techniques based on grammar rules or statistical machine translation are still not robust enough to tackle the common errors in sentences produced by second language learners. In this paper, a relative position language model and a parse template language model are proposed to complement traditional language modeling techniques in addressing this problem. A corpus of erroneous EnglishChinese language transfer sentences along with their corrected counterparts is created and manually judged by human annotators. Experimental results show that compared to a state-of-the-art phrase-based statistical machine translation system, the error correction performance of the proposed approach achieves a significant improvement using human evaluation.