Automatic detection of gender and number agreement errors in Spanish texts written by Japanese learners

Abstract

This paper describes the creation of a grammar to automatically detect agreement errors (gender and number) in Spanish texts written by Japanese learners. The grammar has been written using the Constraint Grammar formal- ism (Karlsson et al., 1995), and uses as input the morphosyntactic analysis provided by the Spanish parser HISPAL (Bick, 2006). For developing and testing the grammar, a learner corpus of 25,000 words has been manually annotated with agreement error tags. Both the grammar and the data from the corpus serve us to draw some conclusions about the characteristics of agreement errors in Japanese learners’ Spanish.