In plain words: They tested language models that rewrite whole sentences to fix grammar, instead of the usual trick of ranking individual edits by how likely each one is. These models performed consistently well, staying competitive with the best grammar-correcting systems and setting a strong baseline.
Abstract · The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Transformer Language Models in Grammatical Error Correction
Recent work on Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) has highlighted the importance of language modeling in that it is certainly possible to achieve good performance by comparing the probabilities of the proposed edits. At the same time, advancements in language modeling have managed to generate linguistic output, which is almost indistinguishable from that of human-generated text. In this paper, we up the ante by exploring the potential of more sophisticated language models in GEC and offer some key insights on their strengths and weaknesses. We show that, in line with recent results in other NLP tasks, Transformer architectures achieve consistently high performance and provide a competitive baseline for future machine learning models.
Dimitrios Alikaniotis, Vipul Raheja
arXiv:1906.01733 · cs.CL, cs.LG, cs.NE · submitted Jun 4, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · 7 pages, 3 tables, accepted at the 14th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications
Creating annotated corpus always incurs overhead, and these guys figured out how to perform effective GEC on raw data.