Improving Automatic Grammatical Error Annotation for Chinese Through Linguistically-Informed Error Typology

Yang Gu, Zihao Huang, Min Zeng, Mengyang Qiu, Jungyeul Park


Abstract
Comprehensive error annotation is essential for developing effective Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) systems and delivering meaningful feedback to learners. This paper introduces improvements to automatic grammatical error annotation for Chinese. Our refined framework addresses language-specific challenges that cause common spelling errors in Chinese, including pronunciation similarity, visual shape similarity, specialized participles, and word ordering. In a case study, we demonstrated our system’s ability to provide detailed feedback on 12-16% of all errors by identifying them under our new error typology, specific enough to uncover subtle differences in error patterns between L1 and L2 writings. In addition to improving automated feedback for writers, this work also highlights the value of incorporating language-specific features in NLP systems.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.189
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2781–2798
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.189/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yang Gu, Zihao Huang, Min Zeng, Mengyang Qiu, and Jungyeul Park. 2025. Improving Automatic Grammatical Error Annotation for Chinese Through Linguistically-Informed Error Typology. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 2781–2798, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving Automatic Grammatical Error Annotation for Chinese Through Linguistically-Informed Error Typology (Gu et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.189.pdf