Correcting well-known interference errors – Towards a L 2 grammar checker for Inari Saami (2023)

Abstract: We present GramDivvun, the first Inari Saami grammar checker for L2 users. The grammar checker is an important tool in the revitalisation of the language, in particular for strengthening the literary language. As the Inari Saami language community needs language tools predominantly for language learners, the focus is on grammatical interference errors made by (mostly Finnish-speaking) learners. Six of these errors are featured in the first version of the grammar checker. For non-proofread text written by inexperienced writers, precision is good, 73%. With experienced text and proofread text, alarms are rare but precision considerably lower, 19.5 % on average, but varying considerably between the error types. The paper discusses reasons for this variation. Future plans are improving results by means of increased testing, especially for complex sentences, and eventually also including more error types.

## introduction knowing what a language community needs is the basis for creating meaningful writing tools. in the inari saami case, most speakers at work age have learnt the language as adults, and now they are also taking great responsibility for creating modern writing culture, with linguistic help of a handful of native speakers. the next step is to write more and thereby becoming more proficient writers. in order to facilitate this, there is a need for writing tools for l2 users. according to feedback from l2 writers, they need a grammar checker to correct their own texts. the focus on the subsequent revision process can then be on errors outside the scope of both spell checker and grammar checker. modern language technology tools, in particular a spellchecker and a morphologically-aware e-dictionary, have been introduced to inari saami writers, and these tools are in active use. based on inari saami proofreading experience, the most common type of errors is syntactic interference errors copying finnish syntax, as described in chapter 3. in order to help writers correct such errors, we have built a grammar checker for inari saami, gramdivvun, with l2 writers as its primary target group. the whole grammar checker is freely available on our web page1 and can be integrated in google docs and microsoft word as described on the web page. in this article we shall investigate whether gramdivvun for some specific constructions is able to change the grammatical structure in l2 writers' inari saami text from an underlying finnish grammar to a correct inari saami one. at the same time gramdivvun should also be usable as an l1 speakers' grammar checker. in order to do this, we made a rule-based grammar checker for inari saami with the same technical framework as the ones for north saami @xcite and lule saami @xcite , but where the focus was not on l1 but on l2 users. section 2 presents the language community and the technical background for the programs chosen. section 3 discusses grammatical differences between inari saami and finnish (the native language of most inari saami writers) and section 4 presents the grammar checker program. then section 5 presents how the grammar checker deals with errors and evaluates its performance. finally, in section 6 comes a conclusion. ## the grammar checker the inari saami grammar checker is built on handwritten constraint grammar rules. the grammar checker module uses mainly two syntactic rule types, add for adding error labels, and copy for creating correct morphological strings that are then generated by the morphological fst generator. in this version of gramdivvun, we use flat syntactic structures, including valencies and semantic categories. there is an option for including dependencies if the specific error type requires it. however this has not been the case for the rules implemented for inari saami yet. the simplified add-rule in the box below adds an error tag (&msyn-obj-plnom-placc) to a plural nominative noun if it has a left context with a transitive finite verb that is preceded by a nominative. we further exclude (with the 0c condition) the possibility that the target noun has other readings than nominative plural. in addition we exclude that there is a third person plural verb in agreement with the noun to its right. the copy-rule on the other hand replaces the nominative tag with an accusative tag. in addition it removes the error tag and replaces it with the label &suggest marking that this line is a correction of the error. the present version of the grammar checker5 contains 160 constraint grammar rules (dated 16.03.2023) that map error labels onto word forms, for 88 different error types. in this article we focus on a smaller selection of the most frequent error types that get corrected reliably without too many false alarms. the focus is on releasing a preliminary tool that can be tested by users. ## conclusion and future perspectives we have written a basic inari saami grammar checker (gramdivvun). here we evaluate a subset of if, containing rules for the 5 most common error types of l2 users. based on our evaluation of a test corpus of learner texts, the subset of l2 error rules presented in section 3 has a fairly good precision of 73% this corpus had a high number of inter-ference errors, and the grammar checker was able to identify them quite reliably. compared to this, the precision in a larger reference corpus written by more experienced writers was lower. the grammar checker focuses on interference errors from finnish. the experience from the present study indicates that the focus for some time to come should be upon improving precision for the rules discussed in the present paper, with a focus on recall being the next step. investigating other error types in inari saami text and correcting them we leave for further research.