--- title: "May I check the English of your paper!!! — Bhaskar 2011" description: "This paper describes a Jadavpur University entry to the HOO (Help Our Own) shared task of 2011. 4 references, cited by 1 paper here." authors: ["Pinaki Bhaskar", "Aniruddha Ghosh", "Santanu Pal", "Sivaji Bandyopadhyay"] year: 2011 venue: "Proceedings of the 13th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation" source: "https://aclanthology.org/W11-2839/" licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/bhaskar-2011-may-i-check-english-your/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/bhaskar-2011-may-i-check-english-your/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2011](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2011/page/2/) / May I check the English of your paper!!! # May I check the English of your paper!!! **Authors:** Pinaki Bhaskar, [Aniruddha Ghosh](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/aniruddha-ghosh/), [Santanu Pal](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/santanu-pal/) and [Sivaji Bandyopadhyay](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/sivaji-bandyopadhyay/) · **Year:** 2011 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of the 13th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/european-workshop-on-natural-language-generation/) ([European Workshop on Natural Language Generation 2011](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/european-workshop-on-natural-language-generation/2011/)) · **Publisher:** [Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/association-for-computational-linguistics/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/W11-2839/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W11-2839.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W1724034852) **Citations:** 7 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · 1 in our library, of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read ## Summary This paper describes a Jadavpur University entry to the HOO (Help Our Own) shared task of 2011. The task asks systems to automatically fix English errors in research papers, mostly those written by non-native authors. The authors combine two components. The first is a rule-based layer that uses the Stanford dependency parser and POS tags, together with handmade resources: a preposition list, a verb paradigm table and an adjective/adverb dictionary. Its rules cover prepositions, verb forms, agreement, countability and serial-comma punctuation. The second is a statistical determiner model built with CRF++. It was trained on the HOO training data plus the authors' own published papers, using word, root, POS, number and position features. A set of post-correction rules then refines the CRF output by checking whether a noun was already mentioned earlier in the paragraph. The outputs of all parts are merged. The single submitted run scored modest F-scores of 0.204 for detection, 0.178 for recognition and 0.167 for correction. The work shows a pragmatic hybrid design: hand rules handle the regular error types, and a learned model handles articles, which resist rules. ## Key points - Results from one submitted run: F-score 0.204 for detection, 0.178 for recognition and 0.167 for correction. - Errors are sorted into coarse groups (wrong form, missing, needs replacing, unnecessary), each crossed with a POS category. Example tags include FT, RT, FV, FD, FY, FJ, RC, RP, UP, CN, CQ, AGV and MT. - The rule-based model relies on these resources: - Stanford dependency parser output, used to find the subject for verb agreement; - a manual preposition list and a verb paradigm table; - word-position cues to tell adverbs from adjectives; - small handcrafted rules for missing prepositions, such as "all" → "all of" and parallel prepositions in "not only … but". - The determiner model is CRF++ with a trigram setup. Its training marks each determiner plus the two words after it, and also a preceding preposition. Training data was expanded with the authors' own papers. - The authors admit failures on many syntactic and semantic errors, such as a wrongly used "a". They also note that one error can carry several valid tags. ## Interesting ideas - **Two-of-three agreement vote.** Countability errors are fixed by majority vote among three signals: the quantifier, the noun's number and the verb. Whichever signal disagrees with the other two is treated as the error, which turns a vague inconsistency into a specific, explainable edit. - **Givenness decides the article.** If a noun already appeared earlier in the paragraph, the system inserts "the" or replaces "a" with "the". Discourse history thus drives the article choice, not local context alone. - **Writers have personal error profiles.** Listing errors per document showed that each author keeps repeating the same kinds of mistakes. Profiling errors by source can therefore guide where corrections are needed. - **Rules first, statistics for the irregular, rules again after.** Hand rules cover the regular phenomena, a sequence labeler takes the hard one (determiners), and a second rule layer cleans up the labeler's output. - **Operation-based error taxonomy.** Each error is labeled by an edit type (wrong form, missing, replace, unnecessary) crossed with a POS category. This makes coverage gaps easy to see; for example, the "missing" group was clearly the hardest. ## For Mova How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests: - **I1** (tree): When Number features disagree across a det–noun–verb triple in a UD tree, a majority rule could choose which token's morphology to repair and record the reason for the choice. - **I2** (back): During generation from the world of the text, an entity already introduced should get a definite article, and a new one an indefinite article, directly from the entity registry. - **I3** (learn): Disagreements among witness parsers could be grouped by source or genre, so that repair rules are induced for each recurring error profile. - **I4** (learn): Self-induced repair rules could be applied as a post-pass over gparse or perceptron outputs, targeting known systematic slips instead of retraining for every one. - **I5** (learn): Evaluation reports could break parser and frame errors down by edit type × POS, which shows which repairs are absent and helps design negative controls. *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* ## Institutions - [Jadavpur University](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/jadavpur-university/) — University, Kolkata, India · 8 works · 336 citations 📚 Shelves (5): [🖥️ Computer Science](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/) · 18,614 works · [🤖 Artificial Intelligence](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/artificial-intelligence/) · 17,965 works · [🎭 Arts and Humanities](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/) · 17,450 works · [🗣️ Language and Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/language-and-linguistics/) · 17,296 works · [👁️ Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/computer-vision-and-pattern-recognition/) · 3,486 works 🧭 Topics (1): [English](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/english/) · 2,379 works ## Cite Cite as: Pinaki Bhaskar, Aniruddha Ghosh, Santanu Pal and Sivaji Bandyopadhyay. 2011. May I check the English of your paper!!!. Proceedings of the 13th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation. The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{bhaskar2011may, title = {{May I check the English of your paper!!!}}, author = {Pinaki Bhaskar, Aniruddha Ghosh, Santanu Pal and Sivaji Bandyopadhyay}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation}, year = {2011}, url = {https://aclanthology.org/W11-2839/} } ``` - [← previous Is it Worth Submitting this Run? Assess your RTE System with a Good Sparring Partner](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/kouylekov-2011-is-it-worth-submitting-this/) - [next → Measuring Language Development in Early Childhood Education: A Case Study of Grammar Checking in Child Language Transcripts](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/hassanali-2011-measuring-language-development-early-childhood/) - [↑ back to papers of 2011](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2011/page/2/) ## References 4 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. George Heidorn.2000.Intelligent writing assistance.In R Dale, H Moisl, and H Somers, editors, Handbook of Natural Language Processing, pages 181–207. Marcel Dekker Inc. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=George+Heidorn%2E2000%2EIntelligent+writing+assistance%2EIn+R+Dale%2C+H+Moisl%2C+and+H+Somers%2C+editors%2C+Handbook+of+Natural+Language+Processing%2C+pages+181%E2%80%93207%2E+Marcel+Dekker+Inc%2E) 2. GE Heidorn. 1975. Augmented phrase structure grammars. In: BL Webber, RC Schank, eds. Theoretical Issues in Natural Language Processing. Assoc.for Computational Linguistics, pp.1-5. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=GE+Heidorn%2E+1975%2E+Augmented+phrase+structure+grammars%2E+In%3A+BL+Webber%2C+RC+Schank%2C+eds%2E+Theoretical+Issues+in+Natural+Language+Processing%2E+Assoc%2Efor+Computational+Linguistics%2C+pp%2E1%2D5%2E) 3. Dale and Kilgarriff, 2010. Helping Our Own: Text Massaging for Computational Linguistics as a New Shared Task, International Natural Language Generation Conference 2010, Dublin, Ireland. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Dale+and+Kilgarriff%2C+2010%2E+Helping+Our+Own%3A+Text+Massaging+for+Computational+Linguistics+as+a+New+Shared+Task%2C+International+Natural+Language+Generation+Conference+2010%2C+Dublin%2C+Ireland%2E) 4. J R Tetreault and M S Chodorow. 2008. [The ups and downs of preposition error detection in ESL writing](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/tetreault-2008-ups-downs-preposition-error-detection/). In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma) Strauss Jane, The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation, 10thEdition. [↗](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma) *Updated 31 October 2026*