A Systematic Review of Automated Grammar Checking in English Language

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. However, fewer efforts have been made in surveying the literature in the past decade. The objective of this systematic review is to examine the existing literature, highlight the current issues and suggest the potential directions of future research. This systematic review is a result of analysis of 20 primary studies obtained after following a search strategy for selecting papers from different resources. Among the main observations, we found that the existing approaches have concentrated mainly on syntax errors. The existing approaches have used an imbalanced dataset for experiments that consists of almost 78% sentences with syntax and semantic errors and almost 16% with sentence level errors. No tool is suitable for real time applications such as proofreading and writing assistance. In this paper, we present a possible scheme for the classification of grammar errors. Also, we present several useful illustrations- most prominent are the schematic diagrams that we have designed for each primary study and some other representations which collate these approaches along different dimensions. This facilitates better understandability, comparison and evaluation of the existing work in this domain.