Applying Machine Translation Techniques to the Evaluation of Grammar Texts

This paper describes a methodology for the evaluation of translation and usage rules of the type usually found in pedagogical grammar texts; the methodology is applied to two types of such rules written from different perspectives, and the conclusions drawn from this exercise are presented. The work is of relevance to teachers and compilers of learner grammars, since it allows the comparison of various ways of explaining linguistic phenomena. Techniques from Machine Translation (MT) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) are used as part of the evaluation methodology.