A Chinese Grammatical Error Correction Method Based on Iterative Training and Sequence Tagging

Chinese grammatical error correction (GEC) is under continuous development and improvement, and this is a challenging task in the field of natural language processing due to the high complexity and flexibility of Chinese grammar. Nowadays, the iterative sequence tagging approach is widely applied to Chinese GEC tasks because it has a faster inference speed than sequence generation approaches. However, the training phase of the iterative sequence tagging approach uses sentences for only one round, while the inference phase is an iterative process. This makes the model focus only on the current sentence’s current error correction results rather than considering the results after multiple rounds of correction. In order to address this problem of mismatch between the training and inference processes, we propose a Chinese GEC method based on iterative training and sequence tagging (CGEC-IT). First, in the iterative training phase, we dynamically generate the target tags for each round by using the final target sentences and the input sentences of the current round. The final loss is the average of each round’s loss. Next, by adding conditional random fields for sequence labeling, we ensure that the model pays more attention to the overall labeling results. In addition, we use the focal loss to solve the problem of category imbalance caused by the fact that most words in text error correction do not need error correction. Furthermore, the experiments on NLPCC 2018 Task 2 show that our method outperforms prior work by up to 2% on the F0.5 score, which verifies the efficiency of iterative training on the Chinese GEC model.