TITLE: USING LOCAL FOCUS TO CORRECT ILLEGAL NP OMISSIONS (A PH.D. PROPOSAL) AUTHORS: Linda Z. Suri COMMENTS: UD CIS Technical Report No. 93-07, March 1992 ABSTRACT: Correcting text which is ill-formed with respect to grammar and/or discourse strategies is a challenging problem. We are working on this problem from the perspective of helping deaf writers produce text which conforms to the standard rules of English. This perspective may prove to be particularly interesting since the native language of some deaf writers is American Sign Language (ASL), which differs from English in both its syntax and its discourse strategies and thus may have an interesting influence on written English. The work described in this proposal is part of a much larger project. The long term goal of the overall project is to develop an instructional writing tool which will take a writing sample from a deaf person, analyze it to identify deviations from standard English, engage the user in a corrective tutorial dialogue, and generate text which is correct with respect to the context. The overall system can be seen as having two phases. The identification phase will rely on a grammar of English which has been augmented with a set of syntactic and semantic error productions which extend the language accepted by the parser and semantic interpreter to include the types of deviations we expect. The interactive tutorial and correction phase will be driven by annotations on the error productions as well as discourse information which will be tracked through the dialogue. The work proposed in this document is part of the correction and tutorial phase. In particular, it focuses in discourse information which must be tracked in order to generate a correction to a particular class of errors. The particular solution that we are proposing is motivated by the hypothesis that the underlying source of these errors is the transfer of a discourse strategy from ASL to English. This hypothesis is substantiated by an analysis of writing samples and a comparison of ASL and English which has led us to conclude that language transfer, if defined broadly enough, can explain many of the errors we have uncovered. This explanation has led us to an algorithm for correcting the particular class of errors we are concentrating on in this thesis. The algorithm works for every instance we have so far uncovered in our samples.