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<Paper uid="C88-2127">
  <Title>SENSITIVE PARSING: ERROR ANALYSIS AND EXPLANATION IN AN INTELLIGENT LANGUAGE TUTORING SYSTEM</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1. INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> errors, but the err0r~ and the reasons for them have to be understood. To formulate this concisely, we could say : we are attempting to perform sensitive parsing rather than robust parsing.This means that we aim to achieve al system which is very sensitive to all possible kinds of errors and which moreover tries to find the &amp;quot;why&amp;quot; and the &amp;quot;how&amp;quot; of errors.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Related research has been carried out by \[MENZEL 1986; PULMAN 1984; WEISCHEDEL et al. 1978\]. Menzel's system is much more limited than ours, because he handles only fragmentory utterances whereas we try to analyse the correctness of complete sentences freely formed by students. Weischedel's treatment of syntactic and.agreement errors is very similar to ours but less general and less thorough (they only recognize an error without explaning the reasons for it!.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> In this paper, we present a uniform framework for dealing with errors in natural language sentences within the context of automated second language teaching. The idea is to use a feature grammar and to analyse errors as being sentences where features have other values than those they should have. By using a feature grammar it is possible to describe various types of errors (agreement, syntactic and semantic errors) in a uniform framework, to'. define in a clear and transparent way what an error is and -this is very important for our application- to analyse errors as arising from a misunderstanding or ignorance of grammatical rules on the part of the students.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The treatment and even the definition of errors within a language tutoring context is very different from the context of other applications of natural language understanding (c. f. approaches as described in \[WEISCHEDEL 1983\]),; because the goal is different. In most applications, the', goal is to understand a sentence despite any errors, i. e. to somehow analyse the sentence. In a language tutoring I system, the goal is to understand what the Student wanted to do, where he went wrong and what grammar rules he misunderstood or was unaware of. In this respect, error; treatment is more difficult in the context of language tutoring than in other contexts, because errors do not needl to be just ignored or sentences to be parsed despite any~ Here it is proposed to describe how we deal with agreement, syntactic and semantic errors within a German language tutoring system \[SCHWlND 1986\].</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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