Acceptability prediction by means of grammaticality quantification

We propose in this paper a method for quantifying sentence grammaticality. The approach based on Property Grammars, a constraint-based syntactic formalism, makes it possible to evaluate a grammaticality index for any kind of sentence, including ill-formed ones. We compare on a sample of sentences the grammaticality indices obtained from PG formalism and the acceptability judgements measured by means of a psycholinguistic analysis. The results show that the derived grammaticality index is a fairly good tracer of acceptability scores.