Abstract
Synthetic data generation is widely known to boost the accuracy of neural grammatical error correction (GEC) systems, but existing methods often lack diversity or are too simplistic to generate the broad range of grammatical errors made by human writers. In this work, we use error type tags from automatic annotation tools such as ERRANT to guide synthetic data generation. We compare several models that can produce an ungrammatical sentence given a clean sentence and an error type tag. We use these models to build a new, large synthetic pre-training data set with error tag frequency distributions matching a given development set. Our synthetic data set yields large and consistent gains, improving the state-of-the-art on the BEA-19 and CoNLL-14 test sets. We also show that our approach is particularly effective in adapting a GEC system, trained on mixed native and non-native English, to a native English test set, even surpassing real training data consisting of high-quality sentence pairs.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.bea-1.4
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 16th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications
- Month:
- April
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Jill Burstein, Andrea Horbach, Ekaterina Kochmar, Ronja Laarmann-Quante, Claudia Leacock, Nitin Madnani, Ildikó Pilán, Helen Yannakoudakis, Torsten Zesch
- Venue:
- BEA
- SIG:
- SIGEDU
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 37–47
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.bea-1.4
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Felix Stahlberg and Shankar Kumar. 2021. Synthetic Data Generation for Grammatical Error Correction with Tagged Corruption Models. In Proceedings of the 16th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, pages 37–47, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Synthetic Data Generation for Grammatical Error Correction with Tagged Corruption Models (Stahlberg & Kumar, BEA 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2021.bea-1.4.pdf
- Code
- google-research-datasets/C4_200M-synthetic-dataset-for-grammatical-error-correction
- Data
- FCE, JFLEG