To date, the conventional wisdom in the error detection community has been to avoid the use of statistical parsers under the belief that a WSJtrained parser's performance would degrade too much on noisy learner texts and that the traditionally hard problem of prepositional phrase attachment would be even harder when parsing ESL writing.
for our immediate future work, we plan to carry out the ESL evaluation on a larger test set to better gauge the usefulness of a parser in this context, to carry out a detailed error analysis to understand why certain parse features are effective and to explore a larger set of features.