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"Punctuation errors"
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Between you & me : confessions of a Comma Queen
\"Mary Norris has spent more than three decades in The New Yorker's copy department, maintaining its celebrated high standards. Now she brings her vast experience, good cheer, and finely sharpened pencils to help the rest of us in a boisterous language book as full of life as it is of practical advice. [The book] features Norris's ... descriptions of some of the most common and vexing problems in spelling, punctuation, and usage--comma faults, danglers, 'who' vs. 'whom,' 'that' vs. 'which,' compound words, gender-neutral language--and her ... explanations of how to handle them\"--Dust jacket flap.
Book
Comma Distribution in Czech Texts: Variation by Genre and Author, and Error Analysis
This article investigates the distribution and typology of commas in Czech texts, combining genre-differentiated samples with an annotated error corpus to offer a comprehensive view of punctuation usage and misuse. Building on previous work, we expand the analysis from a small newspaper sample to a broader set of texts, encompassing fiction, blogs, translations, and school dictations. Using a consistent typology of comma usage, we classify 1,000 manually selected instances and identify trends in different textual genres. Furthermore, we examine over 1,000 missing comma errors and more than 200 redundant ones from the self-built error corpus. The results reveal genre-dependent tendencies in comma types, especially in the use of commas preceding connectives and within asyndetic structures. The study offers insights for improving automatic comma insertion systems and deepens our understanding of punctuation norms and deviations in Czech.
Journal Article
Disentangling Language Disorder and Bilingualism in Children with Developmental Language Disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorder: Evidence from Writing
Twenty-eight Albanian-Greek bilingual children with Developmental Language Disorder and 28 children with Autism Spectrum Disorder but no language impairment, along with 28 typically-developing, age-, Performance IQ- and socioeconomic status-matched bilingual children were asked to produce two expository texts which were coded for spelling (phonological, grammatical, orthographic) errors, stress and punctuation use. The children’s expressive vocabulary, current language use and home language history were also measured. The results show that the bilingual children with Developmental Language Disorder were particularly vulnerable to spelling errors, while their bilingual peers with Autism Spectrum Disorder were rather challenged by stress and punctuation. The evidence speaks in favor of distinct patterns of writing impairment across the bilingual children with Developmental Language Disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Journal Article
Panini: a transformer-based grammatical error correction method for Bangla
The purpose of the Bangla grammatical error correction task is to spontaneously identify and correct syntactic, morphological, semantic, and punctuation mistakes in written Bangla text using computational models, ultimately enhancing language precision and eloquence. The significance of the task encompasses bolstering linguistic acumen, fostering efficacious communication, and ensuring utmost lucidity and meticulousness in written expression, thereby mitigating the potential for obfuscation or dissemination of fallacious connotations. Prior endeavors have centered around surmounting the constraints inherent in rule-based and statistical methods through the exploration of machine learning and deep learning methods, aiming to enhance accuracy by apprehending intricate linguistic patterns, comprehending contextual cues, and discerning semantic nuances. In this study, we address the absence of a baseline for the task by developing a large-scale parallel corpus comprising 7.7M source-target pairs and exploring the untapped potential of transformers. Alongside the corpus, we introduce a Vaswani-style efficient monolingual transformer-based method named Bangla grammatical error corrector, Panini by leveraging transfer learning, which has become the state-of-the-art method for the task by surpassing the performance of both BanglaT5 and T5-Small by 18.81% and 23.8% of accuracy scores, and 11.5 and 15.6 of SacreBLEU scores, respectively. The empirical findings of the method substantiate its superiority over other approaches when it comes to capturing intricate linguistic rules and patterns. Moreover, the efficacy of our proposed method has been compared with the Bangla paraphrase task, showcasing its superior capability by outperforming the previous state-of-the-art method for the task as well. The BanglaGEC corpus and Panini, along with the baselines of BGEC and the Bangla paraphrase task, have been made publicly accessible at
https://tinyurl.com/BanglaGEC
.
Journal Article
Error Analysis in Written Tasks of Albanian-Speaking GFL Learners at B1 Level: Common Types and Causes
Understanding common errors that students of a foreign language make and their causes can enhance our ability to adjust teaching methodologies. This paper aimed to analyze errors that Albanian students of German language and literature make when writing texts in German as a foreign language. This qualitative and quantitative analysis set out to identify and classify errors and find the causes of errors. The study is based on 100 students of German at the B1 level, including participants from language schools and first-year students from the German Department at the University of Prishtina “Hasan Prishtina”. Students were required to submit written texts for analysis. The analysis of these texts was used to address the following research question: What are the typical and recurrent errors made by learners of German as a foreign language (GFL) and what are their causes? The analysis of written texts showed that errors occur at all linguistic levels, with grammatical errors being the most common, followed by orthography and punctuation and syntax. Most errors arose from interference between the native Albanian and the foreign language English, followed by competence and overgeneralization.
Journal Article
International students’ experiences on speaking and writing skills in language learning processes in higher education
Although speaking and writing skills play a crucial role in second language acquisition, studies focusing specifically on the challenges faced by international students learning Turkish as a foreign language remain limited. This study aims to explore the experiences of international students enrolled in higher education institutions in Turkey, particularly regarding the development of their speaking and writing skills in the context of Turkish language learning. Adopting a phenomenological design within a qualitative research framework, data were collected from 24 international students through semi-structured interviews and analyzed using content analysis. The findings revealed that students struggled with the pronunciation of certain sounds, maintaining fluency, organizing their thoughts coherently, expressing themselves accurately, applying grammar rules, and choosing appropriate vocabulary. Furthermore, participants reported experiencing anxiety about making mistakes, as well as various psychological barriers that hindered their ability to express themselves effectively. In terms of writing skills, the most prominent difficulties included grammatical errors, challenges in spelling vowels and specific consonants, misuse of punctuation, and slow writing speed. Students also indicated that their limited vocabulary and difficulties adapting to Turkish syntax negatively affected their writing performance. These findings underscore the need for integrated language instruction programs that simultaneously address speaking and writing skills, offering structured practice opportunities, anxiety-reducing strategies, and greater chances for meaningful interaction. The results provide valuable insights for language instructors, curriculum designers, and policymakers aiming to improve Turkish as a foreign language instruction tailored to the specific needs of international learners.
Journal Article
Capturing L2 Accuracy Developmental Patterns: Insights From an Error-Tagged EFL Learner Corpus
The present article addresses the issue of second language accuracy developmental trajectories and shows how they can be captured via an error-tagged version of an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learner corpus. The data used in this study were extracted from the International Corpus of Learner English (Granger et al., 2009) and consist of a total of 223 learner essays. Each composition was (a) manually and exhaustively annotated for errors following the Louvain error-tagging taxonomy (Dagneaux, Denness, & Granger, 1998) and (b) individually rated by two (sometimes three) testing experts according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of Europe, 2001) descriptors for linguistic competence. As a result, each text was assigned a B1 (lower intermediate), B2 (upper intermediate), C1 (advanced), or C2 (near-native) score. A refined counting method, potential occasion analysis, which relies on both an error-tagged and a part-of-speech-tagged version of the learner data, was used to quantify the errors. This allowed the analysis to trace the type of development displayed by more than 40 error types along the B1—C2 proficiency range. The results indicate that the EFL error developmental patterns tend to be dominated by progress and stabilization trends and that progress is often located between B1 and B2.
Journal Article
What do spelling errors tell us? Classification and analysis of errors made by Greek schoolchildren with and without dyslexia
In this study we propose a classification system for spelling errors and determine the most common spelling difficulties of Greek children with and without dyslexia. Spelling skills of 542 children from the general population and 44 children with dyslexia, Grades 3–4 and 7, were assessed with a dictated common word list and age-appropriate passages. Spelling errors were classified into broad categories, including phonological (graphophonemic mappings), grammatical (inflectional suffixes), orthographic (word stems), stress assignment (diacritic), and punctuation. Errors were further classified into specific subcategories. Relative proportions for a total of 11,364 errors were derived by calculating the opportunities for each error type. Nondyslexic children of both age groups made primarily grammatical and stress errors, followed by orthographic errors. Phonological and punctuation errors were negligible. Most frequent specific errors were in derivational affixes, stress diacritics, inflectional suffixes, and vowel historical spellings. Older children made fewer errors, especially in inflectional suffixes. Dyslexic children differed from nondyslexic ones in making more errors of the same types, in comparable relative proportions. Spelling profiles of dyslexic children did not differ from those of same-age children with poor reading skills or of younger children matched in reading and phonological awareness. In conclusion, spelling errors of both dyslexic and nondyslexic children indicate persistent difficulty with internalizing regularities of the Greek orthographic lexicon, including derivational, inflectional, and word (stem) families. This difficulty is greater for children with dyslexia.
Journal Article
Translation Errors Made by Visually Impaired Translators and Their Implications for Translation Accuracy
Recently, many translation products created by visually impaired translators have emerged in Indonesia. The quality of these translated works has been widely studied (Nugroho et al., 2016; Suryaningtyas & Cahyono, 2018), but these studies have not examined the effect of errors on the quality of translation accuracy. Using actual translation assignments, we identified errors made by visually impaired translators in academic and non-academic texts, and also the effect of these errors towards the quality of translation accuracy. From the data analysis stage, the researchers managed to identify major translation errors and minor translation errors. Major errors include incorrect words, incorrect terminology, incomplete sentences, and parts of speech. The minor errors consist of punctuation, spacing, omission, loan words, and redundant words. All types of translation errors, both major and minor, reduce the quality of translation accuracy. Interestingly, only spacing errors do not fully reduce the quality of translation accuracy in both types of texts. This happens because there is neither alteration nor ambiguity of meaning, and loss of certain information in the translated text. The researchers concluded that these translation errors occur due to poor competency of translators, limited capabilities of using assistive technology, and negligence of certain processes / steps of translation that the translator must carry out that the translator must carry out.
Journal Article
Tailored Fine-tuning for Comma Insertion in Czech
Transfer learning techniques, particularly the use of pre-trained Transformers, can be trained on vast amounts of text in a particular language and can be tailored to specific grammar correction tasks, such as automatic punctuation correction. The Czech pre-trained RoBERTa model demonstrates outstanding performance in this task (Machura et al. 2022); however, previous attempts to improve the model have so far led to a slight degradation (Machura et al. 2023). In this paper, we present a more targeted fine-tuning of this model, addressing linguistic phenomena that the base model overlooked. Additionally, we provide a comparison with other models trained on a more diverse dataset beyond just web texts.
Journal Article