Large-scale pre-trained language models such as GPT-3 have shown remarkable performance across various natural language processing tasks. However, applying prompt-based methods with GPT-3 for Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) tasks and their controllability remains underexplored. Controllability in GEC is crucial for real-world applications, particularly in educational settings, where the ability to tailor feedback according to learner levels and specific error types can significantly enhance the learning process. This paper investigates the performance and controllability of prompt-based methods with GPT-3 for GEC tasks using zero-shot and few-shot setting. We explore the impact of task instructions and examples on GPT-3’s output, focusing on controlling aspects such as minimal edits, fluency edits, and learner levels. Our findings demonstrate that GPT-3 could effectively perform GEC tasks, outperforming existing supervised and unsupervised approaches. We also showed that GPT-3 could achieve controllability when appropriate task instructions and examples are given.

Neural models trained with large amount of parallel data have achieved impressive performance in abstractive summarization tasks. However, large-scale parallel corpora are expensive and challenging to construct. In this work, we introduce a low-cost and effective strategy, ExtraPhrase, to augment training data for abstractive summarization tasks. ExtraPhrase constructs pseudo training data in two steps: extractive summarization and paraphrasing. We extract major parts of an input text in the extractive summarization step and obtain its diverse expressions with the paraphrasing step. Through experiments, we show that ExtraPhrase improves the performance of abstractive summarization tasks by more than 0.50 points in ROUGE scores compared to the setting without data augmentation. ExtraPhrase also outperforms existing methods such as back-translation and self-training. We also show that ExtraPhrase is significantly effective when the amount of genuine training data is remarkably small, i.e., a low-resource setting. Moreover, ExtraPhrase is more cost-efficient than the existing approaches