Papers › A Multilayer Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Neural Network for Grammatical Error Correction

A Multilayer Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Neural Network for Grammatical Error Correction

26 Jan 2018arXiv:1801.08831archive 2025-07-28

Shamil Chollampatt, Hwee Tou Ng

We improve automatic correction of grammatical, orthographic, and collocation errors in text using a multilayer convolutional encoder-decoder neural network. The network is initialized with embeddings that make use of character N-gram information to better suit this task. When evaluated on common benchmark test data sets (CoNLL-2014 and JFLEG), our model substantially outperforms all prior neural approaches on this task as well as strong statistical machine translation-based systems with neural and task-specific features trained on the same data. Our analysis shows the superiority of convolutional neural networks over recurrent neural networks such as long short-term memory (LSTM) networks in capturing the local context via attention, and thereby improving the coverage in correcting grammatical errors. By ensembling multiple models, and incorporating an N-gram language model and edit features via rescoring, our novel method becomes the first neural approach to outperform the current state-of-the-art statistical machine translation-based approach, both in terms of grammaticality and fluency.

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Tasks

DecoderGrammatical Error CorrectionLanguage ModelingLanguage ModellingTranslation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Grammatical Error Correction CoNLL-2014 Shared Task CNN Seq2Seq F0.5 54.79 #23 of 23 Archive leaderboard report
Grammatical Error Correction CoNLL-2014 Shared Task (10 annotations) CNN Seq2Seq F0.5 70.14 #3 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Grammatical Error Correction JFLEG CNN Seq2Seq GLEU 57.47 #6 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Grammatical Error Correction Restricted CNN Seq2Seq F0.5 70.14 (measured by Ge et al., 2018) #1 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Grammatical Error Correction _Restricted_ CNN Seq2Seq GLEU 57.47 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report

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