In this paper, we introduce the Greek version of the automatic annotation tool ERRANT (Bryant et al., 2017), which we named ELERRANT. ERRANT functions as a rule-based error type classifier and was used as the main evaluation tool of the systems participating in the BEA-2019 (Bryant et al., 2019) shared task. Here, we discuss grammatical and morphological differences between English and Greek and how these differences affected the development of ELERRANT. We also introduce the first Greek Native Corpus (GNC) and the Greek WikiEdits Corpus (GWE), two new evaluation datasets with errors from native Greek learners and Wikipedia Talk Pages edits respectively. These two datasets are used for the evaluation of ELERRANT. This paper is a sole fragment of a bigger picture which illustrates the attempt to solve the problem of low-resource languages in NLP, in our case Greek.

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) is the task of correcting different types of errors in written texts. To manage this task, large amounts of annotated data that contain erroneous sentences are required. This data, however, is usually annotated according to each annotator’s standards, making it difficult to manage multiple sets of data at the same time. The recently introduced Error Annotation Toolkit (ERRANT) tackled this problem by presenting a way to automatically annotate data that contain grammatical errors, while also providing a standardisation for annotation. ERRANT extracts the errors and classifies them into error types, in the form of an edit that can be used in the creation of GEC systems, as well as for grammatical error analysis. However, we observe that certain errors are falsely or ambiguously classified. This could obstruct any qualitative or quantitative grammatical error type analysis, as the results would be inaccurate. In this work, we use a sample of the FCE coprus (Yannakoudakis et al., 2011) for secondary error type annotation and we show that up to 39% of the annotations of the most frequent type should be re-classified. Our corrections will be publicly released, so that they can serve as the starting point of a broader, collaborative, ongoing correction process.