Papers › LM-Critic: Language Models for Unsupervised Grammatical Error Correction
LM-Critic: Language Models for Unsupervised Grammatical Error Correction
Michihiro Yasunaga, Jure Leskovec, Percy Liang
Training a model for grammatical error correction (GEC) requires a set of labeled ungrammatical / grammatical sentence pairs, but manually annotating such pairs can be expensive. Recently, the Break-It-Fix-It (BIFI) framework has demonstrated strong results on learning to repair a broken program without any labeled examples, but this relies on a perfect critic (e.g., a compiler) that returns whether an example is valid or not, which does not exist for the GEC task. In this work, we show how to leverage a pretrained language model (LM) in defining an LM-Critic, which judges a sentence to be grammatical if the LM assigns it a higher probability than its local perturbations. We apply this LM-Critic and BIFI along with a large set of unlabeled sentences to bootstrap realistic ungrammatical / grammatical pairs for training a corrector. We evaluate our approach on GEC datasets across multiple domains (CoNLL-2014, BEA-2019, GMEG-wiki and GMEG-yahoo) and show that it outperforms existing methods in both the unsupervised setting (+7.7 F0.5) and the supervised setting (+0.5 F0.5).
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Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grammatical Error Correction | BEA-2019 (test) | LM-Critic | F0.5 | 72.9 | #12 of 19 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Grammatical Error Correction | CoNLL-2014 Shared Task | LM-Critic | F0.5 | 65.8 | #11 of 23 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Grammatical Error Correction | Restricted | + BIFI with no critic | F0.5 | 18.7 | #4 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Grammatical Error Correction | Unrestricted | + BIFI (ours) | F0.5 | 42.4 | #2 of 3 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
Methods
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