@inproceedings{keita-etal-2026-grammatical,
title = "Grammatical Error Correction for Low-Resource Languages: The Case of {Z}arma",
author = "Keita, Mamadou K. and
Zampieri, Marcos and
Homan, Christopher M and
Bremang, Adwoa Asantewaa and
Asamoah Owusu, Dennis and
Le, Huy",
editor = "Hettiarachchi, Hansi and
Ranasinghe, Tharindu and
Plum, Alistair and
Rayson, Paul and
Mitkov, Ruslan and
Gaber, Mohamed and
Premasiri, Damith and
Tan, Fiona Anting and
Uyangodage, Lasitha",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages ({L}o{R}es{LM} 2026)",
month = mar,
year = "2026",
address = "Rabat, Morocco",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.loreslm-1.9/",
pages = "98--109",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-377-7",
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."
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<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.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Grammatical Error Correction for Low-Resource Languages: The Case of Zarma
%A Keita, Mamadou K.
%A Zampieri, Marcos
%A Homan, Christopher M.
%A Bremang, Adwoa Asantewaa
%A Asamoah Owusu, Dennis
%A Le, Huy
%Y Hettiarachchi, Hansi
%Y Ranasinghe, Tharindu
%Y Plum, Alistair
%Y Rayson, Paul
%Y Mitkov, Ruslan
%Y Gaber, Mohamed
%Y Premasiri, Damith
%Y Tan, Fiona Anting
%Y Uyangodage, Lasitha
%S Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages (LoResLM 2026)
%D 2026
%8 March
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Rabat, Morocco
%@ 979-8-89176-377-7
%F keita-etal-2026-grammatical
%X 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.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.loreslm-1.9/
%P 98-109
Markdown (Informal)
[Grammatical Error Correction for Low-Resource Languages: The Case of Zarma](https://aclanthology.org/2026.loreslm-1.9/) (Keita et al., LoResLM 2026)
ACL