Byte-Level Grammatical Error Correction Using Synthetic and Curated Corpora

Svanhvít Lilja Ingólfsdóttir, Petur Ragnarsson, Haukur Jónsson, Haukur Simonarson, Vilhjalmur Thorsteinsson, Vésteinn Snæbjarnarson


Abstract
Grammatical error correction (GEC) is the task of correcting typos, spelling, punctuation and grammatical issues in text. Approaching the problem as a sequence-to-sequence task, we compare the use of a common subword unit vocabulary and byte-level encoding. Initial synthetic training data is created using an error-generating pipeline, and used for finetuning two subword-level models and one byte-level model. Models are then finetuned further on hand-corrected error corpora, including texts written by children, university students, dyslexic and second-language writers, and evaluated over different error types and error origins. We show that a byte-level model enables higher correction quality than a subword approach, not only for simple spelling errors, but also for more complex semantic, stylistic and grammatical issues. In particular, initial training on synthetic corpora followed by finetuning on a relatively small parallel corpus of real-world errors helps the byte-level model correct a wide range of commonly occurring errors. Our experiments are run for the Icelandic language but should hold for other similar languages, and in particular to morphologically rich ones.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.402
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7299–7316
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.402
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.402
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Svanhvít Lilja Ingólfsdóttir, Petur Ragnarsson, Haukur Jónsson, Haukur Simonarson, Vilhjalmur Thorsteinsson, and Vésteinn Snæbjarnarson. 2023. Byte-Level Grammatical Error Correction Using Synthetic and Curated Corpora. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 7299–7316, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Byte-Level Grammatical Error Correction Using Synthetic and Curated Corpora (Ingólfsdóttir et al., ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.402.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.402.mp4