Grammatical Error Correction in Low Error Density Domains: A New Benchmark and Analyses

Simon Flachs, Ophélie Lacroix, Helen Yannakoudakis, Marek Rei, Anders Søgaard


Abstract
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 the inability of systems to rely on a strong internal language model in low error density domains. We hope this work shall facilitate the development of open-domain GEC models that generalize to different topics and genres.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.680
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8467–8478
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.680
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.680
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Simon Flachs, Ophélie Lacroix, Helen Yannakoudakis, Marek Rei, and Anders Søgaard. 2020. Grammatical Error Correction in Low Error Density Domains: A New Benchmark and Analyses. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 8467–8478, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Grammatical Error Correction in Low Error Density Domains: A New Benchmark and Analyses (Flachs et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.680.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38938771
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