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<Paper uid="W97-0902">
  <Title>Developing a new grammar checker for English as a second language</Title>
  <Section position="7" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="evalu">
    <SectionTitle>
6 Evaluation
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In a first evaluation using the approach described in Tschichold (1994), we compared our prototype to three commercial grammar checkers: Correct Grammar for Macintosh (version 2.0 of the monolingual English grammar checker developed by  three commercial grammar checkers French users 4.2 version of the Reference Software grammar checker) and WinProof for PC (version 4.0 of Lexpertise Linguistic Software's English grammar checker for French speakers). While the overall percentage of correctly detected errors is still rather low for all of the tested checkers, Table 3 clearly shows that our prototype does the best at keeping the overflagging down while doing relatively well on real errors. 2 A more extensive evaluation can be found in Cornu et al. (forthcoming).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Another way of evaluating our prototype is to see how closely it follows the guidelines for an efficient EFL/ESL grammar checker proposed by Granger &amp; Meunier (1994). They describe four different criteria which should apply to grammar checkers used by non-natives. According to them, a good second language grammar checker should: * be based on authentic learner errors: This first criterion is met with the error corpus we collected to help us identify the types of errors that need to be dealt with. * have a core program and bilingual 'addon' components: The general island processing approach we have adopted can be employed both for monolingual and bilingual grammar checkers. Full parse approaches, however, 2 The error detection scores shown here are rather low compared to those of other evaluations (e.g. Bolt 1992, Granger &amp; Meunier 1994). This can be explained by the fact that most of the test items used came from real texts produced by non-native speakers and were not specifically written by the evaluator to test a particular system. Real texts contain many iexical and semantic errors which cannot be corrected with today's grammar checkers. are not as easy to use on non-native speaker texts which contain many errors. 'Add-on' components will include the kinds of writing aids we have integrated into the prototype.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> * be customizable: The grammar checker can be customized by turning on or off certain groups of automata relating to grammatical areas such as &amp;quot;subject-verb agreement&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;tense&amp;quot;. * indicate what it can and cannot do: This variable is dealt with both in flyers sent around and in the checker's manual. As our prototype is not yet commercialized, this last criterion does yet apply here.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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