Improving Grammatical Error Correction with Machine Translation Pairs

Wangchunshu Zhou, Tao Ge, Chang Mu, Ke Xu, Furu Wei, Ming Zhou


Abstract
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 (e.g., Chinese to English) of different qualities (i.e., poor and good). The poor translation model can resemble the ESL (English as a second language) learner and tends to generate translations of low quality in terms of fluency and grammaticality, while the good translation model generally generates fluent and grammatically correct translations. With the pair of translation models, we can generate unlimited numbers of poor to good English sentence pairs from text in the source language (e.g., Chinese) of the translators. Our approach can generate various error-corrected patterns and nicely complement the other data synthesis approaches for GEC. Experimental results demonstrate the data generated by our approach can effectively help a GEC model to improve the performance and achieve the state-of-the-art single-model performance in BEA-19 and CoNLL-14 benchmark datasets.
Anthology ID:
2020.findings-emnlp.30
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
318–328
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.30
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.30
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wangchunshu Zhou, Tao Ge, Chang Mu, Ke Xu, Furu Wei, and Ming Zhou. 2020. Improving Grammatical Error Correction with Machine Translation Pairs. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020, pages 318–328, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving Grammatical Error Correction with Machine Translation Pairs (Zhou et al., Findings 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.30.pdf
Data
FCE