A Simple and Robust Approach to Detecting Subject-Verb Agreement Errors

Simon Flachs, Ophélie Lacroix, Marek Rei, Helen Yannakoudakis, Anders Søgaard

Abstract
While rule-based detection of subject-verb agreement (SVA) errors is sensitive to syntactic parsing errors and irregularities and exceptions to the main rules, neural sequential labelers have a tendency to overfit their training data. We observe that rule-based error generation is less sensitive to syntactic parsing errors and irregularities than error detection and explore a simple, yet efficient approach to getting the best of both worlds: We train neural sequential labelers on the combination of large volumes of silver standard data, obtained through rule-based error generation, and gold standard data. We show that our simple protocol leads to more robust detection of SVA errors on both in-domain and out-of-domain data, as well as in the context of other errors and long-distance dependencies; and across four standard benchmarks, the induced model on average achieves a new state of the art.
Anthology ID:
N19-1251
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2418–2427
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1251
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1251
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Simon Flachs, Ophélie Lacroix, Marek Rei, Helen Yannakoudakis, and Anders Søgaard. 2019. A Simple and Robust Approach to Detecting Subject-Verb Agreement Errors. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 2418–2427, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Simple and Robust Approach to Detecting Subject-Verb Agreement Errors (Flachs et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/N19-1251.pdf
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