We report on the results of the first ever shared task on feedback comment generation for language learners held as Generation Challenge (GenChal) in INLG 2022, which we call FCG GenChal. Feedback comment generation for language learners is a task where, given a text and a span, a system generates, for the span, an explanatory note that helps the writer (language learner) improve their writing skills. We show how well we can generate feedback comments with present techniques. We also shed light on the task properties and the difficulties in this task, with insights into the task including data development, evaluation, and comparisons of generation systems.

Lexical complexity prediction (LCP) is the task of predicting the complexity of words in a text on a continuous scale. It plays a vital role in simplifying or annotating complex words to assist readers. To study lexical complexity in Japanese, we construct the first Japanese LCP dataset. Our dataset provides separate complexity scores for Chinese/Korean annotators and others to address the readers’ L1-specific needs. In the baseline experiment, we demonstrate the effectiveness of a BERT-based system for Japanese LCP.

Cloze tests play an essential role in language assessment and help language learners improve their skills. In this paper, we propose a novel task called Cloze Quality Estimation (CQE) — a zero-shot task of evaluating whether a cloze test is of sufficient “high-quality” for language assessment based on two important factors: reliability and validity. We have taken the first step by creating a new dataset named CELA for the CQE task, which includes English cloze tests and corresponding evaluations about their quality annotated by native English speakers, which includes 2,597 and 1,730 instances in aspects of reliability and validity, respectively. We have tested baseline evaluation methods on the dataset, showing that our method could contribute to the CQE task, but the task is still challenging.

Providing explanations for cloze questions in language assessment (LA) has been recognized as a valuable approach to enhancing the language proficiency of learners. However, there is a noticeable absence of dedicated tasks and datasets specifically designed for generating language learner explanations. In response to this gap, this paper introduces a novel task ClozEx of generating explanations for cloze questions in LA, with a particular focus on English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. To support this task, we present a meticulously curated dataset comprising cloze questions paired with corresponding explanations. This dataset aims to assess language proficiency and facilitates language learning by offering informative and accurate explanations. To tackle the task, we fine-tuned various baseline models with our training data, including encoder-decoder and decoder-only architectures. We also explored whether large language models (LLMs) are able to generate good explanations without fine-tuning, just using pre-defined prompts. The evaluation results demonstrate that encoder-decoder models have the potential to deliver fluent and valid explanations when trained on our dataset.

In grammatical error correction (GEC), automatic evaluation is considered as an important factor for research and development of GEC systems. Previous studies on automatic evaluation have shown that quality estimation models built from datasets with manual evaluation can achieve high performance in automatic evaluation of English GEC. However, quality estimation models have not yet been studied in Japanese, because there are no datasets for constructing quality estimation models. In this study, therefore, we created a quality estimation dataset with manual evaluation to build an automatic evaluation model for Japanese GEC. By building a quality estimation model using this dataset and conducting a meta-evaluation, we verified the usefulness of the quality estimation model for Japanese GEC.

This study investigates how supervised quality estimation (QE) models of grammatical error correction (GEC) are affected by the learners’ proficiency with the data. QE models for GEC evaluations in prior work have obtained a high correlation with manual evaluations. However, when functioning in a real-world context, the data used for the reported results have limitations because prior works were biased toward data by learners with relatively high proficiency levels. To address this issue, we created a QE dataset that includes multiple proficiency levels and explored the necessity of performing proficiency-wise evaluation for QE of GEC. Our experiments demonstrated that differences in evaluation dataset proficiency affect the performance of QE models, and proficiency-wise evaluation helps create more robust models.

In this paper, we propose a generation challenge called Feedback comment generation for language learners. It is a task where given a text and a span, a system generates, for the span, an explanatory note that helps the writer (language learner) improve their writing skills. The motivations for this challenge are: (i) practically, it will be beneficial for both language learners and teachers if a computer-assisted language learning system can provide feedback comments just as human teachers do; (ii) theoretically, feedback comment generation for language learners has a mixed aspect of other generation tasks together with its unique features and it will be interesting to explore what kind of generation technique is effective against what kind of writing rule. To this end, we have created a dataset and developed baseline systems to estimate baseline performance. With these preparations, we propose a generation challenge of feedback comment generation.

This paper investigates how to effectively incorporate a pre-trained masked language model (MLM), such as BERT, into an encoder-decoder (EncDec) model for grammatical error correction (GEC). The answer to this question is not as straightforward as one might expect because the previous common methods for incorporating a MLM into an EncDec model have potential drawbacks when applied to GEC. For example, the distribution of the inputs to a GEC model can be considerably different (erroneous, clumsy, etc.) from that of the corpora used for pre-training MLMs; however, this issue is not addressed in the previous methods. Our experiments show that our proposed method, where we first fine-tune a MLM with a given GEC corpus and then use the output of the fine-tuned MLM as additional features in the GEC model, maximizes the benefit of the MLM. The best-performing model achieves state-of-the-art performances on the BEA-2019 and CoNLL-2014 benchmarks. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/kanekomasahiro/bert-gec.

Many recent Short Answer Scoring (SAS) systems have employed Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) as the evaluation measure of their systems. However, we hypothesize that QWK is unsatisfactory for the evaluation of the SAS systems when we consider measuring their effectiveness in actual usage. We introduce a new task formulation of SAS that matches the actual usage. In our formulation, the SAS systems should extract as many scoring predictions that are not critical scoring errors (CSEs). We conduct the experiments in our new task formulation and demonstrate that a typical SAS system can predict scores with zero CSE for approximately 50% of test data at maximum by filtering out low-reliablility predictions on the basis of a certain confidence estimation. This result directly indicates the possibility of reducing half the scoring cost of human raters, which is more preferable for the evaluation of SAS systems.

Existing approaches for grammatical error correction (GEC) largely rely on supervised learning with manually created GEC datasets. However, there has been little focus on verifying and ensuring the quality of the datasets, and on how lower-quality data might affect GEC performance. We indeed found that there is a non-negligible amount of “noise” where errors were inappropriately edited or left uncorrected. To address this, we designed a self-refinement method where the key idea is to denoise these datasets by leveraging the prediction consistency of existing models, and outperformed strong denoising baseline methods. We further applied task-specific techniques and achieved state-of-the-art performance on the CoNLL-2014, JFLEG, and BEA-2019 benchmarks. We then analyzed the effect of the proposed denoising method, and found that our approach leads to improved coverage of corrections and facilitated fluency edits which are reflected in higher recall and overall performance.

The lack of large-scale datasets has been a major hindrance to the development of NLP tasks such as spelling correction and grammatical error correction (GEC). As a complementary new resource for these tasks, we present the GitHub Typo Corpus, a large-scale, multilingual dataset of misspellings and grammatical errors along with their corrections harvested from GitHub, a large and popular platform for hosting and sharing git repositories. The dataset, which we have made publicly available, contains more than 350k edits and 65M characters in more than 15 languages, making it the largest dataset of misspellings to date. We also describe our process for filtering true typo edits based on learned classifiers on a small annotated subset, and demonstrate that typo edits can be identified with F1 0.9 using a very simple classifier with only three features. The detailed analyses of the dataset show that existing spelling correctors merely achieve an F-measure of approx. 0.5, suggesting that the dataset serves as a new, rich source of spelling errors that complement existing datasets.

This paper presents performance measures for grammatical error correction which take into account the difficulty of error correction. To the best of our knowledge, no conventional measure has such functionality despite the fact that some errors are easy to correct and others are not. The main purpose of this work is to provide a way of determining the difficulty of error correction and to motivate researchers in the domain to attack such difficult errors. The performance measures are based on the simple idea that the more systems successfully correct an error, the easier it is considered to be. This paper presents a set of algorithms to implement this idea. It evaluates the performance measures quantitatively and qualitatively on a wide variety of corpora and systems, revealing that they agree with our intuition of correction difficulty. A scorer and difficulty weight data based on the algorithms have been made available on the web.

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has shown drastic improvement in its quality when translating clean input, such as text from the news domain. However, existing studies suggest that NMT still struggles with certain kinds of input with considerable noise, such as User-Generated Contents (UGC) on the Internet. To make better use of NMT for cross-cultural communication, one of the most promising directions is to develop a model that correctly handles these expressions. Though its importance has been recognized, it is still not clear as to what creates the great gap in performance between the translation of clean input and that of UGC. To answer the question, we present a new dataset, PheMT, for evaluating the robustness of MT systems against specific linguistic phenomena in Japanese-English translation. Our experiments with the created dataset revealed that not only our in-house models but even widely used off-the-shelf systems are greatly disturbed by the presence of certain phenomena.

We introduce the AIP-Tohoku grammatical error correction (GEC) system for the BEA-2019 shared task in Track 1 (Restricted Track) and Track 2 (Unrestricted Track) using the same system architecture. Our system comprises two key components: error generation and sentence-level error detection. In particular, GEC with sentence-level grammatical error detection is a novel and versatile approach, and we experimentally demonstrate that it significantly improves the precision of the base model. Our system is ranked 9th in Track 1 and 2nd in Track 2.

The incorporation of pseudo data in the training of grammatical error correction models has been one of the main factors in improving the performance of such models. However, consensus is lacking on experimental configurations, namely, choosing how the pseudo data should be generated or used. In this study, these choices are investigated through extensive experiments, and state-of-the-art performance is achieved on the CoNLL-2014 test set (F0.5=65.0) and the official test set of the BEA-2019 shared task (F0.5=70.2) without making any modifications to the model architecture.

This study explores the necessity of performing cross-corpora evaluation for grammatical error correction (GEC) models. GEC models have been previously evaluated based on a single commonly applied corpus: the CoNLL-2014 benchmark. However, the evaluation remains incomplete because the task difficulty varies depending on the test corpus and conditions such as the proficiency levels of the writers and essay topics. To overcome this limitation, we evaluate the performance of several GEC models, including NMT-based (LSTM, CNN, and transformer) and an SMT-based model, against various learner corpora (CoNLL-2013, CoNLL-2014, FCE, JFLEG, ICNALE, and KJ). Evaluation results reveal that the models’ rankings considerably vary depending on the corpus, indicating that single-corpus evaluation is insufficient for GEC models.