Prompting open-source and commercial language models for grammatical error correction of English learner text

Christopher Davis, Andrew Caines, O Andersen, Shiva Taslimipoor, Helen Yannakoudakis, Zheng Yuan, Christopher Bryant, Marek Rei, Paula Buttery


Abstract
Thanks to recent advances in generative AI, we are able to prompt large language models (LLMs) to produce texts which are fluent and grammatical. In addition, it has been shown that we can elicit attempts at grammatical error correction (GEC) from LLMs when prompted with ungrammatical input sentences. We evaluate how well LLMs can perform at GEC by measuring their performance on established benchmark datasets. We go beyond previous studies, which only examined GPT* models on a selection of English GEC datasets, by evaluating seven open-source and three commercial LLMs on four established GEC benchmarks. We investigate model performance and report results against individual error types. Our results indicate that LLMs do not always outperform supervised English GEC models except in specific contexts – namely commercial LLMs on benchmarks annotated with fluency corrections as opposed to minimal edits. We find that several open-source models outperform commercial ones on minimal edit benchmarks, and that in some settings zero-shot prompting is just as competitive as few-shot prompting.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.711
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:
11952–11967
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.711
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Christopher Davis, Andrew Caines, O Andersen, Shiva Taslimipoor, Helen Yannakoudakis, Zheng Yuan, Christopher Bryant, Marek Rei, and Paula Buttery. 2024. Prompting open-source and commercial language models for grammatical error correction of English learner text. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 11952–11967, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Prompting open-source and commercial language models for grammatical error correction of English learner text (Davis et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.711.pdf