Improving Explainability of Sentence-level Metrics via Edit-level Attribution for Grammatical Error Correction

Takumi Goto, Justin Vasselli, Taro Watanabe


Abstract
Various evaluation metrics have been proposed for Grammatical Error Correction (GEC), but many, particularly reference-free metrics, lack explainability. This lack of explainability hinders researchers from analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of GEC models and limits the ability to provide detailed feedback for users. To address this issue, we propose attributing sentence-level scores to individual edits, providing insight into how specific corrections contribute to the overall performance. For the attribution method, we use Shapley values, from cooperative game theory, to compute the contribution of each edit. Experiments with existing sentence-level metrics demonstrate high consistency across different edit granularities and show approximately 70% alignment with human evaluations. In addition, we analyze biases in the metrics based on the attribution results, revealing trends such as the tendency to ignore orthographic edits.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-srw.77
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Jin Zhao, Mingyang Wang, Zhu Liu
Venues:
ACL | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1004–1015
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-srw.77/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Takumi Goto, Justin Vasselli, and Taro Watanabe. 2025. Improving Explainability of Sentence-level Metrics via Edit-level Attribution for Grammatical Error Correction. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop), pages 1004–1015, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving Explainability of Sentence-level Metrics via Edit-level Attribution for Grammatical Error Correction (Goto et al., ACL 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-srw.77.pdf