This study investigates how supervised quality estimation (QE) models of grammatical error correction (GEC) are affected by the learners' proficiency with the data. QE models for GEC evaluations in prior work have obtained a high correlation with manual evaluations. However, when functioning in a real-world context, the data used for the reported results have limitations because prior works were biased toward data by learners with relatively high proficiency levels. To address this issue, we created a QE dataset that includes multiple proficiency levels and explored the necessity of performing proficiency-wise evaluation for QE of GEC. Our experiments demonstrated that differences in evaluation dataset proficiency affect the performance of QE models, and proficiency-wise evaluation helps create more robust models.
Grammar error correction (GEC) systems have become ubiquitous in a variety of software applications, and have started to approach human-level performance for some datasets. However, very little is known about how to efficiently personalize these systems to the user's characteristics, such as their proficiency level and first language, or to emerging domains of text. We present the first results on adapting a general-purpose neural GEC system to both the proficiency level and the first language of a writer, using only a few thousand annotated sentences. Our study is the broadest of its kind, co…
We present a new parallel corpus, JHU FLuency-Extended GUG corpus (JFLEG) for developing and evaluating grammatical error correction (GEC). Unlike other corpora, it represents a broad range of language proficiency levels and uses holistic fluency edits to not only correct grammatical errors but also make the original text more native sounding. We describe the types of corrections made and benchmark four leading GEC systems on this corpus, identifying specific areas in which they do well and how they can improve. JFLEG fulfills the need for a new gold standard to properly assess the current sta…
Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) is a task of detecting and correcting grammatical errors in sentences. Recently, neural machine translation systems have become popular approaches for this task. However, these methods lack the use of syntactic knowledge which plays an important role in the correction of grammatical errors. In this work, we propose a syntax-guided GEC model (SG-GEC) which adopts the graph attention mechanism to utilize the syntactic knowledge of dependency trees. Considering the dependency trees of the grammatically incorrect source sentences might provide incorrect syntactic…
RIKEN AIP（理化学研究所先进智能项目中心）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Tohoku University（东北大学）
There has been an increased interest in data generation approaches to grammatical error correction (GEC) using pseudo data. However, these approaches suffer from several issues that make them inconvenient for real-world deployment including a demand for large amounts of training data. On the other hand, some errors based on grammatical rules may not necessarily require a large amount of data if GEC models can realize grammatical generalization. This study explores to what extent GEC models generalize grammatical knowledge required for correcting errors. We introduce an analysis method using sy…
East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
We propose a novel language-independent approach to improve the efficiency for Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) by dividing the task into two subtasks: Erroneous Span Detection (ESD) and Erroneous Span Correction (ESC). ESD identifies grammatically incorrect text spans with an efficient sequence tagging model. Then, ESC leverages a seq2seq model to take the sentence with annotated erroneous spans as input and only outputs the corrected text for these spans. Experiments show our approach performs comparably to conventional seq2seq approaches in both English and Chinese GEC benchmarks with les…
This study explores the necessity of performing cross-corpora evaluation for grammatical error correction (GEC) models. GEC models have been previously evaluated based on a single commonly applied corpus: the CoNLL-2014 benchmark. However, the evaluation remains incomplete because the task difficulty varies depending on the test corpus and conditions such as the proficiency levels of the writers and essay topics. To overcome this limitation, we evaluate the performance of several GEC models, including NMT-based (LSTM, CNN, and transformer) and an SMT-based model, against various learner corpor…
Siteimprove（Siteimprove公司）；University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；Alexandra Institute（亚历山德拉研究所）；King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）；Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）
Evaluation of grammatical error correction (GEC) systems has primarily focused on essays written by non-native learners of English, which however is only part of the full spectrum of GEC applications. We aim to broaden the target domain of GEC and release CWEB, a new benchmark for GEC consisting of website text generated by English speakers of varying levels of proficiency. Website data is a common and important domain that contains far fewer grammatical errors than learner essays, which we show presents a challenge to state-of-the-art GEC systems. We demonstrate that a factor behind this is t…
In recent years, sequence-to-sequence models have been very effective for end-to-end grammatical error correction (GEC). As creating human-annotated parallel corpus for GEC is expensive and time-consuming, there has been work on artificial corpus generation with the aim of creating sentences that contain realistic grammatical errors from grammatically correct sentences. In this paper, we investigate the impact of using recent neural models for generating errors to help neural models to correct errors. We conduct a battery of experiments on the effect of data size, models, and comparison with a…
We propose a neural encoder-decoder model with reinforcement learning (NRL) for grammatical error correction (GEC). Unlike conventional maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), the model directly optimizes towards an objective that considers a sentence-level, task-specific evaluation metric, avoiding the exposure bias issue in MLE. We demonstrate that NRL outperforms MLE both in human and automated evaluation metrics, achieving the state-of-the-art on a fluency-oriented GEC corpus.
Charles University（查理大学）；Faculty of Mathematics and Physics（数学与物理学院）
Grammatical error correction in English is a long studied problem with many existing systems and datasets. However, there has been only a limited research on error correction of other languages. In this paper, we present a new dataset AKCES-GEC on grammatical error correction for Czech. We then make experiments on Czech, German and Russian and show that when utilizing synthetic parallel corpus, Transformer neural machine translation model can reach new state-of-the-art results on these datasets. AKCES-GEC is published under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license at https://hdl.handle.net/11234/1-3057 and the…
Nomura Research Institute, Ltd.（野村综合研究所株式会社）；Retrieva, Inc.（Retrieva公司）；Tokyo Metropolitan University（东京都立大学）
In recent years, pre-trained models have been extensively studied, and several downstream tasks have benefited from their utilization. In this study, we verify the effectiveness of two methods that incorporate a BERT-based pre-trained model developed by Cui et al. (2020) into an encoder-decoder model on Chinese grammatical error correction tasks. We also analyze the error type and conclude that sentence-level errors are yet to be addressed.
We introduce unsupervised techniques based on phrase-based statistical machine translation for grammatical error correction (GEC) trained on a pseudo learner corpus created by Google Translation. We verified our GEC system through experiments on various GEC dataset, includi ng a low resource track of the shared task at Building Educational Applications 2019 (BEA 2019). As a result, we achieved an F_0.5 score of 28.31 points with the test data of the low resource track.
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；The ALTA Institute（ALTA研究所）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）
We extend a current sequence-tagging approach to Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) by introducing specialised tags for spelling correction and morphological inflection using the SymSpell and LemmInflect algorithms. Our approach improves generalisation: the proposed new tagset allows a smaller number of tags to correct a larger range of errors. Our results show a performance improvement both overall and in the targeted error categories. We further show that ensembles trained with our new tagset outperform those trained with the baseline tagset on the public BEA benchmark.
Current methods for automatically evaluating grammatical error correction (GEC) systems rely on gold-standard references. However, these methods suffer from penalizing grammatical edits that are correct but not in the gold standard. We show that reference-less grammaticality metrics correlate very strongly with human judgments and are competitive with the leading reference-based evaluation metrics. By interpolating both methods, we achieve state-of-the-art correlation with human judgments. Finally, we show that GEC metrics are much more reliable when they are calculated at the sentence level i…
In Grammatical Error Correction (GEC), sequence labeling models enjoy fast inference compared to sequence-to-sequence models; however, inference in sequence labeling GEC models is an iterative process, as sentences are passed to the model for multiple rounds of correction, which exposes the model to sentences with progressively fewer errors at each round. Traditional GEC models learn from sentences with fixed error rates. Coupling this with the iterative correction process causes a mismatch between training and inference that affects final performance. In order to address this mismatch, we pro…
Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) aims to automatically detect and correct grammatical errors. In this aspect, dominant models are trained by one-iteration learning while performing multiple iterations of corrections during inference. Previous studies mainly focus on the data augmentation approach to combat the exposure bias, which suffers from two drawbacks. First, they simply mix additionally-constructed training instances and original ones to train models, which fails to help models be explicitly aware of the procedure of gradual corrections. Second, they ignore the interdependence between…
Both grammatical error correction and text style transfer can be viewed as monolingual sequence-to-sequence transformation tasks, but the scarcity of directly annotated data for either task makes them unfeasible for most languages. We present an approach that does both tasks within the same trained model, and only uses regular language parallel data, without requiring error-corrected or style-adapted texts. We apply our model to three languages and present a thorough evaluation on both tasks, showing that the model is reliable for a number of error types and style transfer aspects.
Metric validation in Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) is currently done by observing the correlation between human and metric-induced rankings. However, such correlation studies are costly, methodologically troublesome, and suffer from low inter-rater agreement. We propose MAEGE, an automatic methodology for GEC metric validation, that overcomes many of the difficulties with existing practices. Experiments with \maege\ shed a new light on metric quality, showing for example that the standard $M^2$ metric fares poorly on corpus-level ranking. Moreover, we use MAEGE to perform a detailed analy…
We combine two of the most popular approaches to automated Grammatical Error Correction (GEC): GEC based on Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) and GEC based on Neural Machine Translation (NMT). The hybrid system achieves new state-of-the-art results on the CoNLL-2014 and JFLEG benchmarks. This GEC system preserves the accuracy of SMT output and, at the same time, generates more fluent sentences as it typical for NMT. Our analysis shows that the created systems are closer to reaching human-level performance than any other GEC system reported so far.
Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) should not focus only on high accuracy of corrections but also on interpretability for language learning. However, existing neural-based GEC models mainly aim at improving accuracy, and their interpretability has not been explored. A promising approach for improving interpretability is an example-based method, which uses similar retrieved examples to generate corrections. In addition, examples are beneficial in language learning, helping learners understand the basis of grammatically incorrect/correct texts and improve their confidence in writing. Therefore, …
The CoNLL-2013 Shared Task on Grammatical Error Correction
Department of Computer Science National University of Singapore（计算机科学系国立新加坡大学）；Centre for English Language Communication National University of Singapore（英语语言沟通中心国立新加坡大学）；Nuance Communications, Inc.（Nuance通讯公司）
We describe two entries from the Cambridge University Engineering Department to the BEA 2019 Shared Task on grammatical error correction. Our submission to the low-resource track is based on prior work on using finite state transducers together with strong neural language models. Our system for the restricted track is a purely neural system consisting of neural language models and neural machine translation models trained with back-translation and a combination of checkpoint averaging and fine-tuning -- without the help of any additional tools like spell checkers. The latter system has been us…
The prevalent use of too few references for evaluating text-to-text generation is known to bias estimates of their quality ({\it low coverage bias} or LCB). This paper shows that overcoming LCB in Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) evaluation cannot be attained by re-scaling or by increasing the number of references in any feasible range, contrary to previous suggestions. This is due to the long-tailed distribution of valid corrections for a sentence. Concretely, we show that LCB incentivizes GEC systems to avoid correcting even when they can generate a valid correction. Consequently, existing…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）
ChatGPT is a cutting-edge artificial intelligence language model developed by OpenAI, which has attracted a lot of attention due to its surprisingly strong ability in answering follow-up questions. In this report, we aim to evaluate ChatGPT on the Grammatical Error Correction(GEC) task, and compare it with commercial GEC product (e.g., Grammarly) and state-of-the-art models (e.g., GECToR). By testing on the CoNLL2014 benchmark dataset, we find that ChatGPT performs not as well as those baselines in terms of the automatic evaluation metrics (e.g., $F_{0.5}$ score), particularly on long sentence…
Tokyo Metropolitan University（东京都立大学）；Recruit Co., Ltd.（瑞可利株式会社）；Tokyo Institute of Technology（东京工业大学）
Grammatical error correction (GEC) suffers from a lack of sufficient parallel data. Therefore, GEC studies have developed various methods to generate pseudo data, which comprise pairs of grammatical and artificially produced ungrammatical sentences. Currently, a mainstream approach to generate pseudo data is back-translation (BT). Most previous GEC studies using BT have employed the same architecture for both GEC and BT models. However, GEC models have different correction tendencies depending on their architectures. Thus, in this study, we compare the correction tendencies of the GEC models t…
Grammatical error correction (GEC) is the task of detecting and correcting grammatical errors in texts written by second language learners. The statistical machine translation (SMT) approach to GEC, in which sentences written by second language learners are translated to grammatically correct sentences, has achieved state-of-the-art accuracy. However, the SMT approach is unable to utilize global context. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to improve the accuracy of GEC, by exploiting the n-best hypotheses generated by an SMT approach. Specifically, we build a classifier to score the ed…
NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering（新加坡国立大学综合科学与工程研究生院）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Phrase-based statistical machine translation (SMT) systems have previously been used for the task of grammatical error correction (GEC) to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy. The superiority of SMT systems comes from their ability to learn text transformations from erroneous to corrected text, without explicitly modeling error types. However, phrase-based SMT systems suffer from limitations of discrete word representation, linear mapping, and lack of global context. In this paper, we address these limitations by using two different yet complementary neural network models, namely a neural networ…
In this paper, we propose a system combination method for grammatical error correction (GEC), based on nonlinear integer programming (IP). Our method optimizes a novel F score objective based on error types, and combines multiple end-to-end GEC systems. The proposed IP approach optimizes the selection of a single best system for each grammatical error type present in the data. Experiments of the IP approach on combining state-of-the-art standalone GEC systems show that the combined system outperforms all standalone systems. It improves F0.5 score by 3.61% when combining the two best participat…
Tokyo Metropolitan University（东京都立大学）；Retrieva, Inc.（雷特里瓦公司）
Studies on grammatical error correction (GEC) have reported the effectiveness of pretraining a Seq2Seq model with a large amount of pseudodata. However, this approach requires time-consuming pretraining for GEC because of the size of the pseudodata. In this study, we explore the utility of bidirectional and auto-regressive transformers (BART) as a generic pretrained encoder-decoder model for GEC. With the use of this generic pretrained model for GEC, the time-consuming pretraining can be eliminated. We find that monolingual and multilingual BART models achieve high performance in GEC, with one…
RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project（理化学研究所先进智能项目中心）；Tohoku University（东北大学）；Future Corporation（Future株式会社）
The incorporation of pseudo data in the training of grammatical error correction models has been one of the main factors in improving the performance of such models. However, consensus is lacking on experimental configurations, namely, choosing how the pseudo data should be generated or used. In this study, these choices are investigated through extensive experiments, and state-of-the-art performance is achieved on the CoNLL-2014 test set ($F_{0.5}=65.0$) and the official test set of the BEA-2019 shared task ($F_{0.5}=70.2$) without making any modifications to the model architecture.
NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering（新加坡国立大学综合科学与工程研究生院）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
We improve automatic correction of grammatical, orthographic, and collocation errors in text using a multilayer convolutional encoder-decoder neural network. The network is initialized with embeddings that make use of character N-gram information to better suit this task. When evaluated on common benchmark test data sets (CoNLL-2014 and JFLEG), our model substantially outperforms all prior neural approaches on this task as well as strong statistical machine translation-based systems with neural and task-specific features trained on the same data. Our analysis shows the superiority of convoluti…
Tokyo Metropolitan University（东京都立大学）；RIKEN（理化学研究所）
In grammatical error correction (GEC), automatic evaluation is an important factor for research and development of GEC systems. Previous studies on automatic evaluation have demonstrated that quality estimation models built from datasets with manual evaluation can achieve high performance in automatic evaluation of English GEC without using reference sentences.. However, quality estimation models have not yet been studied in Japanese, because there are no datasets for constructing quality estimation models. Therefore, in this study, we created a quality estimation dataset with manual evaluatio…
Microsoft AI & Research（微软人工智能与研究部）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Grammatical error correction (GEC) systems strive to correct both global errors in word order and usage, and local errors in spelling and inflection. Further developing upon recent work on neural machine translation, we propose a new hybrid neural model with nested attention layers for GEC. Experiments show that the new model can effectively correct errors of both types by incorporating word and character-level information,and that the model significantly outperforms previous neural models for GEC as measured on the standard CoNLL-14 benchmark dataset. Further analysis also shows that the supe…
This paper presents MuCGEC, a multi-reference multi-source evaluation dataset for Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC), consisting of 7,063 sentences collected from three Chinese-as-a-Second-Language (CSL) learner sources. Each sentence is corrected by three annotators, and their corrections are carefully reviewed by a senior annotator, resulting in 2.3 references per sentence. We conduct experiments with two mainstream CGEC models, i.e., the sequence-to-sequence model and the sequence-to-edit model, both enhanced with large pretrained language models, achieving competitive benchmark pe…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Shanghai Liulishuo Information Technology Ltd（上海流利说信息技术有限公司）
We treat grammatical error correction (GEC) as a classification problem in this study, where for different types of errors, a target word is identified, and the classifier predicts the correct word form from a set of possible choices. We propose a novel neural network based feature representation and classification model, trained using large text corpora without human annotations. Specifically we use RNNs with attention to represent both the left and right context of a target word. All feature embeddings are learned jointly in an end-to-end fashion. Experimental results show that our novel app…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Peking University（北京大学）
We propose a novel data synthesis method to generate diverse error-corrected sentence pairs for improving grammatical error correction, which is based on a pair of machine translation models of different qualities (i.e., poor and good). The poor translation model resembles the ESL (English as a second language) learner and tends to generate translations of low quality in terms of fluency and grammatical correctness, while the good translation model generally generates fluent and grammatically correct translations. We build the poor and good translation model with phrase-based statistical machi…
We present a corpus professionally annotated for grammatical error correction (GEC) and fluency edits in the Ukrainian language. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first GEC corpus for the Ukrainian language. We collected texts with errors (20,715 sentences) from a diverse pool of contributors, including both native and non-native speakers. The data cover a wide variety of writing domains, from text chats and essays to formal writing. Professional proofreaders corrected and annotated the corpus for errors relating to fluency, grammar, punctuation, and spelling. This corpus can be used f…
Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) aims to automatically detect and correct grammatical errors contained in Chinese text. In the long term, researchers regard CGEC as a task with a certain degree of uncertainty, that is, an ungrammatical sentence may often have multiple references. However, we argue that even though this is a very reasonable hypothesis, it is too harsh for the intelligence of the mainstream models in this era. In this paper, we first discover that multiple references do not actually bring positive gains to model training. On the contrary, it is beneficial to the CGEC …
RIKEN（理化学研究所）；Allen Institute for AI（艾伦人工智能研究所）；Earth Species Project（地球物种项目）；Octanove Labs（Octanove实验室）；Tohoku University（东北大学）
Natural language processing technology has rapidly improved automated grammatical error correction tasks, and the community begins to explore document-level revision as one of the next challenges. To go beyond sentence-level automated grammatical error correction to NLP-based document-level revision assistant, there are two major obstacles: (1) there are few public corpora with document-level revisions being annotated by professional editors, and (2) it is not feasible to elicit all possible references and evaluate the quality of revision with such references because there are infinite possibi…
Some grammatical error correction (GEC) systems incorporate hand-crafted rules and achieve positive results. However, manually defining rules is time-consuming and laborious. In view of this, we propose a method to mine error templates for GEC automatically. An error template is a regular expression aiming at identifying text errors. We use the web crawler to acquire such error templates from the Internet. For each template, we further select the corresponding corrective action by using the language model perplexity as a criterion. We have accumulated 1,119 error templates for Chinese GEC base…
