Investigating Glyph-Phonetic Information for Chinese Spell Checking: What Works and What’s Next?

Xiaotian Zhang, Yanjun Zheng, Hang Yan, Xipeng Qiu


Abstract
While pre-trained Chinese language models have demonstrated impressive performance on a wide range of NLP tasks, the Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) task remains a challenge. Previous research has explored using information such as glyphs and phonetics to improve the ability of CSC models to distinguish misspelled characters, with good results at the accuracy level on public datasets. However, the generalization ability of these CSC models has not been well understood: it is unclear whether they incorporate glyph-phonetic information and, if so, whether this information is fully utilized. In this paper, we aim to better understand the role of glyph-phonetic information in the CSC task and suggest directions for improvement. Additionally, we propose a new, more challenging, and practical setting for testing the generalizability of CSC models. All code is made publicly available.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.1
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–13
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.1
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.1
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiaotian Zhang, Yanjun Zheng, Hang Yan, and Xipeng Qiu. 2023. Investigating Glyph-Phonetic Information for Chinese Spell Checking: What Works and What’s Next?. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 1–13, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Investigating Glyph-Phonetic Information for Chinese Spell Checking: What Works and What’s Next? (Zhang et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.1.pdf