Enhancing Text Editing for Grammatical Error Correction: Arabic as a Case Study

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Alhafni, Bashar, Habash, Nizar
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866908389130371072
author Alhafni, Bashar
Habash, Nizar
author_facet Alhafni, Bashar
Habash, Nizar
contents Text editing frames grammatical error correction (GEC) as a sequence tagging problem, where edit tags are assigned to input tokens, and applying these edits results in the corrected text. This approach has gained attention for its efficiency and interpretability. However, while extensively explored for English, text editing remains largely underexplored for morphologically rich languages like Arabic. In this paper, we introduce a text editing approach that derives edit tags directly from data, eliminating the need for language-specific edits. We demonstrate its effectiveness on Arabic, a diglossic and morphologically rich language, and investigate the impact of different edit representations on model performance. Our approach achieves SOTA results on two Arabic GEC benchmarks and performs on par with SOTA on two others. Additionally, our models are over six times faster than existing Arabic GEC systems, making our approach more practical for real-world applications. Finally, we explore ensemble models, demonstrating how combining different models leads to further performance improvements. We make our code, data, and pretrained models publicly available.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_00985
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Enhancing Text Editing for Grammatical Error Correction: Arabic as a Case Study
Alhafni, Bashar
Habash, Nizar
Computation and Language
Text editing frames grammatical error correction (GEC) as a sequence tagging problem, where edit tags are assigned to input tokens, and applying these edits results in the corrected text. This approach has gained attention for its efficiency and interpretability. However, while extensively explored for English, text editing remains largely underexplored for morphologically rich languages like Arabic. In this paper, we introduce a text editing approach that derives edit tags directly from data, eliminating the need for language-specific edits. We demonstrate its effectiveness on Arabic, a diglossic and morphologically rich language, and investigate the impact of different edit representations on model performance. Our approach achieves SOTA results on two Arabic GEC benchmarks and performs on par with SOTA on two others. Additionally, our models are over six times faster than existing Arabic GEC systems, making our approach more practical for real-world applications. Finally, we explore ensemble models, demonstrating how combining different models leads to further performance improvements. We make our code, data, and pretrained models publicly available.
title Enhancing Text Editing for Grammatical Error Correction: Arabic as a Case Study
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.00985