Approaching Neural Grammatical Error Correction as a Low-Resource Machine Translation Task

Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt, Roman Grundkiewicz, Shubha Guha, Kenneth Heafield


Abstract
Previously, neural methods in grammatical error correction (GEC) did not reach state-of-the-art results compared to phrase-based statistical machine translation (SMT) baselines. We demonstrate parallels between neural GEC and low-resource neural MT and successfully adapt several methods from low-resource MT to neural GEC. We further establish guidelines for trustable results in neural GEC and propose a set of model-independent methods for neural GEC that can be easily applied in most GEC settings. Proposed methods include adding source-side noise, domain-adaptation techniques, a GEC-specific training-objective, transfer learning with monolingual data, and ensembling of independently trained GEC models and language models. The combined effects of these methods result in better than state-of-the-art neural GEC models that outperform previously best neural GEC systems by more than 10% M² on the CoNLL-2014 benchmark and 5.9% on the JFLEG test set. Non-neural state-of-the-art systems are outperformed by more than 2% on the CoNLL-2014 benchmark and by 4% on JFLEG.
Anthology ID:
N18-1055
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana
Editors:
Marilyn Walker, Heng Ji, Amanda Stent
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
595–606
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-1055/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N18-1055
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt, Roman Grundkiewicz, Shubha Guha, and Kenneth Heafield. 2018. Approaching Neural Grammatical Error Correction as a Low-Resource Machine Translation Task. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers), pages 595–606, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Approaching Neural Grammatical Error Correction as a Low-Resource Machine Translation Task (Junczys-Dowmunt et al., NAACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-1055.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/N18-1055.mp4
Code
 grammatical/neural-naacl2018
Data
CoNLLCoNLL-2014 Shared Task: Grammatical Error CorrectionFCEJFLEG