Improving Chinese Spelling Check by Character Pronunciation Prediction: The Effects of Adaptivity and Granularity

Jiahao Li, Quan Wang, Zhendong Mao, Junbo Guo, Yanyan Yang, Yongdong Zhang


Abstract
Chinese spelling check (CSC) is a fundamental NLP task that detects and corrects spelling errors in Chinese texts. As most of these spelling errors are caused by phonetic similarity, effectively modeling the pronunciation of Chinese characters is a key factor for CSC. In this paper, we consider introducing an auxiliary task of Chinese pronunciation prediction (CPP) to improve CSC, and, for the first time, systematically discuss the adaptivity and granularity of this auxiliary task. We propose SCOPE which builds upon a shared encoder two parallel decoders, one for the primary CSC task and the other for a fine-grained auxiliary CPP task, with a novel adaptive weighting scheme to balance the two tasks. In addition, we design a delicate iterative correction strategy for further improvements during inference. Empirical evaluation shows that SCOPE achieves new state-of-the-art on three CSC benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness and superiority of the auxiliary CPP task. Comprehensive ablation studies further verify the positive effects of adaptivity and granularity of the task.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.287
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4275–4286
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.287
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.287
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jiahao Li, Quan Wang, Zhendong Mao, Junbo Guo, Yanyan Yang, and Yongdong Zhang. 2022. Improving Chinese Spelling Check by Character Pronunciation Prediction: The Effects of Adaptivity and Granularity. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4275–4286, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving Chinese Spelling Check by Character Pronunciation Prediction: The Effects of Adaptivity and Granularity (Li et al., EMNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2022.emnlp-main.287.pdf