Automatically correcting adverb placement errors in the writings of French users of English

This paper presents part of a project for designing automatic correction strategies for the complex syntactic errors found in the writings of French users of English. We focus on adverb placement errors as a first step: analysis shows that a large percentage of adverb placement errors concern manner adverbs used as modifiers in the VP, and might be due to negative transfer. In order to correct these errors, we model existing grammatical analyses and attempt to identify the main parameters underlying adverb placement. We show how erroneous segments can be corrected using error patterns.