A Simple Recipe for Multilingual Grammatical Error Correction

Sascha Rothe, Jonathan Mallinson, Eric Malmi, Sebastian Krause, Aliaksei Severyn


Abstract
This paper presents a simple recipe to trainstate-of-the-art multilingual Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) models. We achieve this by first proposing a language-agnostic method to generate a large number of synthetic examples. The second ingredient is to use large-scale multilingual language models (up to 11B parameters). Once fine-tuned on language-specific supervised sets we surpass the previous state-of-the-art results on GEC benchmarks in four languages: English, Czech, German and Russian. Having established a new set of baselines for GEC, we make our results easily reproducible and accessible by releasing a CLANG-8 dataset. It is produced by using our best model, which we call gT5, to clean the targets of a widely used yet noisy Lang-8 dataset. cLang-8 greatly simplifies typical GEC training pipelines composed of multiple fine-tuning stages – we demonstrate that performing a single fine-tuning stepon cLang-8 with the off-the-shelf language models yields further accuracy improvements over an already top-performing gT5 model for English.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-short.89
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
702–707
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-short.89
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-short.89
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sascha Rothe, Jonathan Mallinson, Eric Malmi, Sebastian Krause, and Aliaksei Severyn. 2021. A Simple Recipe for Multilingual Grammatical Error Correction. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 702–707, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Simple Recipe for Multilingual Grammatical Error Correction (Rothe et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2021.acl-short.89.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2021.acl-short.89.mp4
Code
 google-research-datasets/clang8
Data
AKCES-GECC4CoNLL-2014 Shared Task: Grammatical Error CorrectionFCEmC4