Abstract:

This paper presents an overview of the research conducted within the FreeText project to build an automatic error diagnosis system for learners of French as a foreign language. After a brief review of the main features of the project and of the learner corpus collected and used within the project, the paper focuses on the error diagnosis system itself and, more specifically, on two of its components: (a) a syntactic checker making use of two different diagnosis techniques to detect errors of purely grammatical nature and (b) a sentence comparison tool which compares learners' answers with those stored in the system to detect possible semantic discrepancies such as referents or word usage. Advantages of such an automatic system and ideas for further research are then discussed.

Author: Sebastien L'Haire, Anne Vandeventer Faltin