Leveraging What’s Overfixed: Post-Correction via LLM Grammatical Error Overcorrection

Taehee Park, Heejin Do, Gary Lee


Abstract
Robust supervised fine-tuned small Language Models (sLMs) often show high reliability but tend to undercorrect. They achieve high precision at the cost of low recall. Conversely, Large Language Models (LLMs) often show the opposite tendency, making excessive overcorrection, leading to low precision. To effectively harness the strengths of LLMs to address the recall challenges in sLMs, we propose Post-Correction via Overcorrection (PoCO), a novel approach that strategically balances recall and precision. PoCO first intentionally triggers overcorrection via LLM to maximize recall by allowing comprehensive revisions, then applies a targeted post-correction step via fine-tuning smaller models to identify and refine erroneous outputs. We aim to harmonize both aspects by leveraging the generative power of LLMs while preserving the reliability of smaller supervised models. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that PoCO effectively balances GEC performance by increasing recall with competitive precision, ultimately improving the overall quality of grammatical error correction.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.1431
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
28183–28195
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-luhme/2025.emnlp-main.1431/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.1431
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Taehee Park, Heejin Do, and Gary Lee. 2025. Leveraging What’s Overfixed: Post-Correction via LLM Grammatical Error Overcorrection. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 28183–28195, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Leveraging What’s Overfixed: Post-Correction via LLM Grammatical Error Overcorrection (Park et al., EMNLP 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-luhme/2025.emnlp-main.1431.pdf
Checklist:
 2025.emnlp-main.1431.checklist.pdf