The UI System in the HOO 2012 Shared Task on Error Correction

We describe the University of Illinois (UI) system that participated in the Helping Our Own (HOO) 2012 shared task, which focuses on correcting preposition and determiner errors made by non-native English speakers. The task consisted of three metrics: Detection, Recognition, and Correction, and measured performance before and after additional revisions to the test data were made. Out of 14 teams that participated, our system scored first in Detection and Recognition and second in Correction before the revisions; and first in Detection and second in the other metrics after revisions. We describe our underlying approach, which relates to our previous work in this area, and propose an improvement to the earlier method, error inflation, which results in significant gains in performance.