A Systematic Review of Automated Grammar Checking in English Language

TL;DR

This systematic review analyzes recent literature on automated English grammar checking, highlighting current challenges, error classification schemes, and the need for more robust real-time tools, while providing comparative visualizations.

Contribution

The paper offers a comprehensive survey of recent grammar checking approaches, introduces a classification scheme for errors, and presents visual summaries to facilitate comparison and understanding.

Findings

Lack of efficient real-time grammar checking tools

Most approaches target specific error types

Visual summaries aid comparison of methods

Abstract

Grammar checking is the task of detection and correction of grammatical errors in the text. English is the dominating language in the field of science and technology. Therefore, the non-native English speakers must be able to use correct English grammar while reading, writing or speaking. This generates the need of automatic grammar checking tools. So far many approaches have been proposed and implemented. But less efforts have been made in surveying the literature in the past decade. The objective of this systematic review is to examine the existing literature, highlighting the current issues and suggesting the potential directions of future research. This systematic review is a result of analysis of 12 primary studies obtained after designing a search strategy for selecting papers found on the web. We also present a possible scheme for the classification of grammar errors. Among the main observations, we found that there is a lack of efficient and robust grammar checking tools for real time applications. We present several useful illustrations- most prominent are the schematic diagrams that we provide for each approach and a table that summarizes these approaches along different dimensions such as target error types, linguistic dataset used, strengths and limitations of the approach. This facilitates better understandability, comparison and evaluation of previous research.