Grammatical Error Correction Evaluation by Optimally Transporting Edit Representation

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Goto, Takumi, Sakai, Yusuke, Watanabe, Taro
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Goto, Takumi
Sakai, Yusuke
Watanabe, Taro
author_facet Goto, Takumi
Sakai, Yusuke
Watanabe, Taro
contents Automatic evaluation in grammatical error correction (GEC) is crucial for selecting the best-performing systems. Currently, reference-based metrics are a popular choice, which basically measure the similarity between hypothesis and reference sentences. However, similarity measures based on embeddings, such as BERTScore, are often ineffective, since many words in the source sentences remain unchanged in both the hypothesis and the reference. This study focuses on edits specifically designed for GEC, i.e., ERRANT, and computes similarity measured over the edits from the source sentence. To this end, we propose edit vector, a representation for an edit, and introduce a new metric, UOT-ERRANT, which transports these edit vectors from hypothesis to reference using unbalanced optimal transport. Experiments with SEEDA meta-evaluation show that UOT-ERRANT improves evaluation performance, particularly in the +Fluency domain where many edits occur. Moreover, our method is highly interpretable because the transport plan can be interpreted as a soft edit alignment, making UOT-ERRANT a useful metric for both system ranking and analyzing GEC systems. Our code is available from https://github.com/gotutiyan/uot-errant.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_05419
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Grammatical Error Correction Evaluation by Optimally Transporting Edit Representation
Goto, Takumi
Sakai, Yusuke
Watanabe, Taro
Computation and Language
Automatic evaluation in grammatical error correction (GEC) is crucial for selecting the best-performing systems. Currently, reference-based metrics are a popular choice, which basically measure the similarity between hypothesis and reference sentences. However, similarity measures based on embeddings, such as BERTScore, are often ineffective, since many words in the source sentences remain unchanged in both the hypothesis and the reference. This study focuses on edits specifically designed for GEC, i.e., ERRANT, and computes similarity measured over the edits from the source sentence. To this end, we propose edit vector, a representation for an edit, and introduce a new metric, UOT-ERRANT, which transports these edit vectors from hypothesis to reference using unbalanced optimal transport. Experiments with SEEDA meta-evaluation show that UOT-ERRANT improves evaluation performance, particularly in the +Fluency domain where many edits occur. Moreover, our method is highly interpretable because the transport plan can be interpreted as a soft edit alignment, making UOT-ERRANT a useful metric for both system ranking and analyzing GEC systems. Our code is available from https://github.com/gotutiyan/uot-errant.
title Grammatical Error Correction Evaluation by Optimally Transporting Edit Representation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05419