RobustGEC: Robust Grammatical Error Correction Against Subtle Context Perturbation

Yue Zhang, Leyang Cui, Enbo Zhao, Wei Bi, Shuming Shi


Abstract
Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) systems play a vital role in assisting people with their daily writing tasks. However, users may sometimes come across a GEC system that initially performs well but fails to correct errors when the inputs are slightly modified. To ensure an ideal user experience, a reliable GEC system should have the ability to provide consistent and accurate suggestions when encountering irrelevant context perturbations, which we refer to as context robustness. In this paper, we introduce RobustGEC, a benchmark designed to evaluate the context robustness of GEC systems. RobustGEC comprises 5,000 GEC cases, each with one original error-correct sentence pair and five variants carefully devised by human annotators. Utilizing RobustGEC, we reveal that state-of-the-art GEC systems still lack sufficient robustness against context perturbations. Moreover, we propose a simple yet effective method for remitting this issue.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.1043
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
16780–16793
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.1043
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.1043
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yue Zhang, Leyang Cui, Enbo Zhao, Wei Bi, and Shuming Shi. 2023. RobustGEC: Robust Grammatical Error Correction Against Subtle Context Perturbation. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 16780–16793, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
RobustGEC: Robust Grammatical Error Correction Against Subtle Context Perturbation (Zhang et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.1043.pdf
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 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.1043.mp4