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Rethinking Evaluation Metrics for Grammatical Error Correction: Why Use a Different Evaluation Process than Human?

13 Feb 2025arXiv:2502.09416archive 2025-07-28

Takumi Goto, Yusuke Sakai, Taro Watanabe

One of the goals of automatic evaluation metrics in grammatical error correction (GEC) is to rank GEC systems such that it matches human preferences. However, current automatic evaluations are based on procedures that diverge from human evaluation. Specifically, human evaluation derives rankings by aggregating sentence-level relative evaluation results, e.g., pairwise comparisons, using a rating algorithm, whereas automatic evaluation averages sentence-level absolute scores to obtain corpus-level scores, which are then sorted to determine rankings. In this study, we propose an aggregation method for existing automatic evaluation metrics which aligns with human evaluation methods to bridge this gap. We conducted experiments using various metrics, including edit-based metrics, n-gram based metrics, and sentence-level metrics, and show that resolving the gap improves results for the most of metrics on the SEEDA benchmark. We also found that even BERT-based metrics sometimes outperform the metrics of GPT-4. We publish our unified implementation of the metrics and meta-evaluations.

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read_lines gotutiyan/gec-metrics/src/gec_metrics/cli/evaluate.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · d8873cab2939d4e3 · report
read_lines gotutiyan/gec-metrics/src/gec_metrics/meta_eval/utils.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 7bc198cd024f4ed8 · report
read_yaml gotutiyan/gec-metrics/src/gec_metrics/cli/evaluate.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · c0ea064baf23c3b8 · report

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Grammatical Error CorrectionSentence

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Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutGPT-4Label SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

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