Syntactic error detection and correction in date expressions using finite-state transducers

This paper presents a set of experiments for the detection and correction of syntactic errors, exploring two alternative approaches. The first one uses an error grammar which combines a robust morphosyntactic analyser and two groups of finite-state transducers (one for the description of syntactic error patterns and the other for the correction of the detected errors). We have also experimented an alternative approach using a positive date grammar where deviations are detected by applying edit-distance techniques. The system has been tested on a corpus of real texts which contained both correct and incorrect sentences. Although the experiment was limited to one language, the results show that attainable performance is not the only criterion for preferring one solution over another.