Time Is Effort: Estimating Human Post-Editing Time for Grammar Error Correction Tool Evaluation

Ankit Vadehra, Bill Johnson, Gene Saunders, Pascal Poupart


Abstract
Text editing can involve several iterations of revision. Incorporating an efficient Grammar Error Correction (GEC) tool in the initial correction round can significantly impact further human editing effort and final text quality. This raises an interesting question to quantify GEC Tool usability: How much effort can the GEC Tool save users? We present the first large-scale dataset of post-editing (PE) time annotations and corrections for two English GEC test datasets (BEA19 and CoNLL14). We introduce Post-Editing Effort in Time (PEET) for GEC Tools as a human-focused evaluation scorer to rank any GEC Tool by estimating PE time-to-correct. Using our dataset, we quantify the amount of time saved by GEC Tools in text editing. Analyzing the edit type indicated that determining whether a sentence needs correction and edits like paraphrasing and punctuation changes had the greatest impact on PE time. Finally, comparison with human rankings shows that PEET correlates well with technical effort judgment, providing a new human-centric direction for evaluating GEC tool usability. We release our dataset and code at : https://github.com/ankitvad/PEET_Scorer.
Anthology ID:
2025.hcinlp-1.15
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Bridging Human-Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing (HCI+NLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Su Lin Blodgett, Amanda Cercas Curry, Sunipa Dev, Siyan Li, Michael Madaio, Jack Wang, Sherry Tongshuang Wu, Ziang Xiao, Diyi Yang
Venues:
HCINLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
178–196
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.hcinlp-1.15/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ankit Vadehra, Bill Johnson, Gene Saunders, and Pascal Poupart. 2025. Time Is Effort: Estimating Human Post-Editing Time for Grammar Error Correction Tool Evaluation. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Bridging Human-Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing (HCI+NLP), pages 178–196, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Time Is Effort: Estimating Human Post-Editing Time for Grammar Error Correction Tool Evaluation (Vadehra et al., HCINLP 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.hcinlp-1.15.pdf