Grammatical error correction (GEC) suffers from a lack of sufficient parallel data. Studies on GEC have proposed several methods to generate pseudo data, which comprise pairs of grammatical and artificially produced ungrammatical sentences. Currently, a mainstream approach to generate pseudo data is back-translation (BT). Most previous studies using BT have employed the same architecture for both the GEC and BT models. However, GEC models have different correction tendencies depending on the architecture of their models. Thus, in this study, we compare the correction tendencies of GEC models trained on pseudo data generated by three BT models with different architectures, namely, Transformer, CNN, and LSTM. The results confirm that the correction tendencies for each error type are different for every BT model. In addition, we investigate the correction tendencies when using a combination of pseudo data generated by different BT models. As a result, we find that the combination of different BT models improves or interpolates the performance of each error type compared with using a single BT model with different seeds.

Recently, neural machine translation is widely used for its high translation accuracy, but it is also known to show poor performance at long sentence translation. Besides, this tendency appears prominently for low resource languages. We assume that these problems are caused by long sentences being few in the train data. Therefore, we propose a data augmentation method for handling long sentences. Our method is simple; we only use given parallel corpora as train data and generate long sentences by concatenating two sentences. Based on our experiments, we confirm improvements in long sentence translation by proposed data augmentation despite the simplicity. Moreover, the proposed method improves translation quality more when combined with back-translation.

In this study, we propose a beam search method to obtain diverse outputs in a local sequence transduction task where most of the tokens in the source and target sentences overlap, such as in grammatical error correction (GEC). In GEC, it is advisable to rewrite only the local sequences that must be rewritten while leaving the correct sequences unchanged. However, existing methods of acquiring various outputs focus on revising all tokens of a sentence. Therefore, existing methods may either generate ungrammatical sentences because they force the entire sentence to be changed or produce non-diversified sentences by weakening the constraints to avoid generating ungrammatical sentences. Considering these issues, we propose a method that does not rewrite all the tokens in a text, but only rewrites those parts that need to be diversely corrected. Our beam search method adjusts the search token in the beam according to the probability that the prediction is copied from the source sentence. The experimental results show that our proposed method generates more diverse corrections than existing methods without losing accuracy in the GEC task.

We introduce our system that is submitted to the restricted track of the BEA 2019 shared task on grammatical error correction1 (GEC). It is essential to select an appropriate hypothesis sentence from the candidates list generated by the GEC model. A re-ranker can evaluate the naturalness of a corrected sentence using language models trained on large corpora. On the other hand, these language models and language representations do not explicitly take into account the grammatical errors written by learners. Thus, it is not straightforward to utilize language representations trained from a large corpus, such as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), in a form suitable for the learner’s grammatical errors. Therefore, we propose to fine-tune BERT on learner corpora with grammatical errors for re-ranking. The experimental results of the W&I+LOCNESS development dataset demonstrate that re-ranking using BERT can effectively improve the correction performance.

When professional English teachers correct grammatically erroneous sentences written by English learners, they use various methods. The correction method depends on how much corrections a learner requires. In this paper, we propose a method for neural grammar error correction (GEC) that can control the degree of correction. We show that it is possible to actually control the degree of GEC by using new training data annotated with word edit rate. Thereby, diverse corrected sentences is obtained from a single erroneous sentence. Moreover, compared to a GEC model that does not use information on the degree of correction, the proposed method improves correction accuracy.