Automatic Error Detection concerning the Definite and Indefinite Conjugation in the HunLearner Corpus

Abstract

In this paper we present the results of automatic error detection, concerning the definite and indefinite conjugation in the extended version of the HunLearner corpus, the learners’ corpus of the Hungarian language. We present the most typical structures that trigger definite or indefinite conjugation in Hungarian and we also discuss the most frequent types of errors made by language learners in the corpus texts. We also illustrate the error types with sentences taken from the corpus. Our results highlight grammatical structures that might pose problems for learners of Hungarian, which can be fruitfully applied in the teaching and practicing of such constructions from the language teacher’s or learners’ point of view. On the other hand, these results may be exploited in extending the functionalities of a grammar checker, concerning the definiteness of the verb. Our automatic system was able to achieve perfect recall, i.e. it could find all the mismatches between the type of the object and the conjugation of the verb, which is promising for future studies in this area.

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