Chinese Spelling Corrector Is Just a Language Learner

Lai Jiang, Hongqiu Wu, Hai Zhao, Min Zhang


Abstract
This paper emphasizes Chinese spelling correction by means of self-supervised learning, which means there are no annotated errors within the training data. Our intuition is that humans are naturally good correctors with exposure to error-free sentences, which contrasts with current unsupervised methods that strongly rely on the usage of confusion sets to produce parallel sentences. In this paper, we demonstrate that learning a spelling correction model is identical to learning a language model from error-free data alone, with decoding it in a greater search space. We propose Denoising Decoding Correction (D2C), which selectively imposes noise upon the source sentence to determine the underlying correct characters. Our method is largely inspired by the ability of language models to perform correction, including both BERT-based models and large language models (LLMs). We show that the self-supervised learning manner generally outperforms the confusion set in specific domains because it bypasses the need to introduce error characters to the training data which can impair the error patterns not included in the introduced error characters.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.413
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6933–6943
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.413
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lai Jiang, Hongqiu Wu, Hai Zhao, and Min Zhang. 2024. Chinese Spelling Corrector Is Just a Language Learner. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 6933–6943, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Chinese Spelling Corrector Is Just a Language Learner (Jiang et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.413.pdf