Papers › Wronging a Right: Generating Better Errors to Improve Grammatical Error Detection

Wronging a Right: Generating Better Errors to Improve Grammatical Error Detection

26 Sep 2018EMNLP 2018 10arXiv:1810.00668archive 2025-07-28

Kasewa Sudhanshu, Stenetorp Pontus, Riedel Sebastian

Grammatical error correction, like other machine learning tasks, greatly benefits from large quantities of high quality training data, which is typically expensive to produce. While writing a program to automatically generate realistic grammatical errors would be difficult, one could learn the distribution of naturallyoccurring errors and attempt to introduce them into other datasets. Initial work on inducing errors in this way using statistical machine translation has shown promise; we investigate cheaply constructing synthetic samples, given a small corpus of human-annotated data, using an off-the-rack attentive sequence-to-sequence model and a straight-forward post-processing procedure. Our approach yields error-filled artificial data that helps a vanilla bi-directional LSTM to outperform the previous state of the art at grammatical error detection, and a previously introduced model to gain further improvements of over 5% F_(0.5) score. When attempting to determine if a given sentence is synthetic, a human annotator at best achieves 39.39 F₁ score, indicating that our model generates mostly human-like instances.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

skasewa/wronging officialmentioned in papertf report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Grammatical Error CorrectionGrammatical Error DetectionMachine TranslationSentenceTranslation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections