Corrections Meet Explanations: A Unified Framework for Explainable Grammatical Error Correction

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) faces a critical challenge concerning explainability, notably when GEC systems are designed for language learners. Existing research predominantly focuses on explaining grammatical errors extracted in advance, thus neglecting the relationship between explanations and corrections. To address this gap, we introduce EXGEC, a unified explainable GEC framework that integrates explanation and correction tasks in a generative manner, advocating that these tasks mutually reinforce each other. Experiments have been conducted on EXPECT, a recent human-labeled dataset for explainable GEC, comprising around 20k samples. Moreover, we detect significant noise within EXPECT, potentially compromising model training and evaluation. Therefore, we introduce an alternative dataset named EXPECT-denoised, ensuring a more objective framework for training and evaluation. Results on various NLP models (BART, T5, and Llama3) show that EXGEC models surpass single-task baselines in both tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.

EXCGEC: A Benchmark of Edit-wise Explainable Chinese Grammatical Error Correction

Existing studies explore the explainability of Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) in a limited scenario, where they ignore the interaction between corrections and explanations. To bridge the gap, this paper introduces the task of EXplainable GEC (EXGEC), which focuses on the integral role of both correction and explanation tasks. To facilitate the task, we propose EXCGEC, a tailored benchmark for Chinese EXGEC consisting of 8,216 explanation-augmented samples featuring the design of hybrid edit-wise explanations. We benchmark several series of LLMs in multiple settings, covering post-explaining and pre-explaining. To promote the development of the task, we introduce a comprehensive suite of automatic metrics and conduct human evaluation experiments to demonstrate the human consistency of the automatic metrics for free-text explanations. All the codes and data will be released after the review.

Rethinking the Roles of Large Language Models in Chinese Grammatical Error Correction

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely studied by researchers for their roles in various downstream NLP tasks. As a fundamental task in the NLP field, Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) aims to correct all potential grammatical errors in the input sentences. Previous studies have shown that LLMs' performance as correctors on CGEC remains unsatisfactory due to its challenging task focus. To promote the CGEC field to better adapt to the era of LLMs, we rethink the roles of LLMs in the CGEC task so that they can be better utilized and explored in CGEC. Considering the rich grammatical knowledge stored in LLMs and their powerful semantic understanding capabilities, we utilize LLMs as explainers to provide explanation information for the CGEC small models during error correction to enhance performance. We also use LLMs as evaluators to bring more reasonable CGEC evaluations, thus alleviating the troubles caused by the subjectivity of the CGEC task. In particular, our work is also an active exploration of how LLMs and small models better collaborate in downstream tasks. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses on widely used datasets verify the effectiveness of our thinking intuition and the proposed methods.