This repository provides code for training and testing state-of-the-art models for grammatical error correction with the official PyTorch implementation of the following paper:

GECToR – Grammatical Error Correction: Tag, Not Rewrite
Kostiantyn Omelianchuk, Vitaliy Atrasevych, Artem Chernodub, Oleksandr Skurzhanskyi
Grammarly
15th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (co-located with ACL 2020)

It is mainly based on AllenNLP and transformers.

The following command installs all necessary packages:

pip install -r requirements.txt

The project was tested using Python 3.7.

All the public GEC datasets used in the paper can be downloaded from here.
Synthetically created datasets can be generated/downloaded here.
To train the model data has to be preprocessed and converted to special format with the command:

python utils/preprocess_data.py -s SOURCE -t TARGET -o OUTPUT_FILE

To train the model, simply run:

python train.py --train_set TRAIN_SET --dev_set DEV_SET \
                --model_dir MODEL_DIR

There are a lot of parameters to specify among them:

• cold_steps_count the number of epochs where we train only last linear layer
• transformer_model {bert,distilbert,gpt2,roberta,transformerxl,xlnet,albert} model encoder
• tn_prob probability of getting sentences with no errors; helps to balance precision/recall
• pieces_per_token maximum number of subwords per token; helps not to get CUDA out of memory

In our experiments we had 98/2 train/dev split.

We described all parameters that we use for training and evaluating here.

To run your model on the input file use the following command:

python predict.py --model_path MODEL_PATH [MODEL_PATH ...] \
                  --vocab_path VOCAB_PATH --input_file INPUT_FILE \
                  --output_file OUTPUT_FILE

Among parameters:

• min_error_probability - minimum error probability (as in the paper)
• additional_confidence - confidence bias (as in the paper)
• special_tokens_fix to reproduce some reported results of pretrained models

For evaluation use M^2Scorer and ERRANT.

If you find this work is useful for your research, please cite our paper:

@inproceedings{omelianchuk-etal-2020-gector,
    title = "{GECT}o{R} {--} Grammatical Error Correction: Tag, Not Rewrite",
    author = "Omelianchuk, Kostiantyn  and
      Atrasevych, Vitaliy  and
      Chernodub, Artem  and
      Skurzhanskyi, Oleksandr",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fifteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications",
    month = jul,
    year = "2020",
    address = "Seattle, WA, USA → Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.bea-1.16",
    pages = "163--170",
    abstract = "In this paper, we present a simple and efficient GEC sequence tagger using a Transformer encoder. Our system is pre-trained on synthetic data and then fine-tuned in two stages: first on errorful corpora, and second on a combination of errorful and error-free parallel corpora. We design custom token-level transformations to map input tokens to target corrections. Our best single-model/ensemble GEC tagger achieves an F{\_}0.5 of 65.3/66.5 on CONLL-2014 (test) and F{\_}0.5 of 72.4/73.6 on BEA-2019 (test). Its inference speed is up to 10 times as fast as a Transformer-based seq2seq GEC system.",
}