Grammatical Error Correction for Low-Resource Languages: The Case of Zarma

Mamadou K. Keita, Marcos Zampieri, Christopher M Homan, Adwoa Asantewaa Bremang, Dennis Asamoah Owusu, Huy Le


Abstract
Grammatical error correction (GEC) aims to improve text quality and readability. Previous work on the task focused primarily on high-resource languages, while low-resource languages lack robust tools. To address this shortcoming, we present a study on GEC for Zarma, a language spoken by over five million people in West Africa. We compare three approaches: rule-based methods, machine translation (MT) models, and large language models (LLMs). We evaluated GEC models using a dataset of more than 250,000 examples, including synthetic and human-annotated data. Our results showed that the MT-based approach using M2M100 outperforms others, with a detection rate of 95.82% and a suggestion accuracy of 78.90% in automatic evaluations (AE) and an average score of 3.0 out of 5.0 in manual evaluation (ME) from native speakers for grammar and logical corrections. The rule-based method was effective for spelling errors but failed on complex context-level errors. LLMs—Gemma 2b and MT5-small—showed moderate performance. Our work supports use of MT models to enhance GEC in low-resource settings, and we validated these results with Bambara, another West African language.
Anthology ID:
2026.loreslm-1.9
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages (LoResLM 2026)
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Hansi Hettiarachchi, Tharindu Ranasinghe, Alistair Plum, Paul Rayson, Ruslan Mitkov, Mohamed Gaber, Damith Premasiri, Fiona Anting Tan, Lasitha Uyangodage
Venue:
LoResLM
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
98–109
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.loreslm-1.9/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mamadou K. Keita, Marcos Zampieri, Christopher M Homan, Adwoa Asantewaa Bremang, Dennis Asamoah Owusu, and Huy Le. 2026. Grammatical Error Correction for Low-Resource Languages: The Case of Zarma. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages (LoResLM 2026), pages 98–109, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Grammatical Error Correction for Low-Resource Languages: The Case of Zarma (Keita et al., LoResLM 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.loreslm-1.9.pdf