This paper presents a series of experiments in automatic correction of spelling and grammar errors with a statistic and corpus-driven methodology. The language of the experiments is Spanish, but the method can be easily extrapolated to other languages since we do not use language-specific resources. Our main motivation is to develop a tool that could assist university students to write academic texts, because this kind of system is practically nonexistent in the present, especially in Spanish. Our work is based on previous descriptions, which identify the most problematic phenomena in academic writing at university level. We aim to develop a tool for automatic detection and correction of some of those problematic issues at different linguistic levels such as spelling, grammar and vocabulary.

The paper received funding from project 20 PlaCQUID 2012-2013 1, from Universitat Pompeu Fabra.