Driving Chinese Spelling Correction from a Fine-Grained Perspective

Linfeng Liu, Hongqiu Wu, Hai Zhao


Abstract
This paper explores the task: Chinese spelling correction (CSC), from a fine-grained perspec- tive by recognizing that existing evaluations lack nuanced typology for the spelling errors. This deficiency can create a misleading impres- sion of model performance, incurring an “in- visible” bottleneck hindering the advancement of CSC research. In this paper, we first cate- gorize spelling errors into six types and con- duct a fine-grained evaluation across a wide variety of models, including BERT-based mod- els and LLMs. Thus, we are able to pinpoint the underlying weaknesses of existing state-of- the-art models - utilizing contextual clues and handling co-existence of multiple typos, asso- ciated to contextual errors and multi-typo er- rors. However, these errors occur infrequently in conventional training corpus. Therefore, we introduce new error generation methods to aug- ment their occurrence, which can be leveraged to enhance the training of CSC models. We hope this work could provide fresh insight for future CSC research.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.715
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:
10727–10737
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.715/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Linfeng Liu, Hongqiu Wu, and Hai Zhao. 2025. Driving Chinese Spelling Correction from a Fine-Grained Perspective. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 10727–10737, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Driving Chinese Spelling Correction from a Fine-Grained Perspective (Liu et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.715.pdf