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

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

16 Apr 2018NAACL 2018 6arXiv:1804.05940archive 2025-07-28

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

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.

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grammatical/neural-naacl2018 officialmentioned in paperMIT report

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Domain AdaptationGrammatical Error CorrectionMachine TranslationTransfer LearningTranslation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Grammatical Error Correction CoNLL-2014 Shared Task Transformer F0.5 55.8 #22 of 23 Archive leaderboard report
Grammatical Error Correction JFLEG Transformer GLEU 59.9 #5 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Grammatical Error Correction Restricted Transformer F0.5 55.8 #3 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Grammatical Error Correction _Restricted_ Transformer GLEU 59.9 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report

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