Improving English Writing Skills Through NLP-Driven Error Detection and Correction Systems

Abstract

Error detection and correction is an important activity that ensures the quality of written communication, especially in education, business, and legal documentation. State-of-the-art NLP approaches have several issues, including overcorrection, poor handling of multilingual texts, and poor adaptability to domain-specific errors. Traditional methods, based on rule-based approaches or single-task models, fail to capture the complexity of real-world applications, especially in code-switched (multilingual) contexts and resource-scarce languages. To overcome these limitations, this research proposes an advanced error detection and correction framework based on transformer-based models such as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT). The hybrid approach integrates a Seq2Seq architecture with attention mechanisms and error-specific layers for handling grammatical and spelling errors. Synthetic data augmentation techniques, including back-translation, improve the system’s robustness across diverse languages and domains. The architecture attains maximum accuracy of 99%, surpassing the state-of-the-art models, in this case, GPT-3 fine-tuned for grammatical error correction at 98%. It demonstrates superior performance in various multilingual and domain-specific settings, in addition to complex spelling challenges such as homophones and visually similar words. The system was realized using Python with TensorFlow and PyTorch. The system applies C4-200M for training and evaluation. The precision and recall rates, with realtime processing of text, render the model highly useful for practice applications in the areas of education, content development, and platforms for communication. This research fills a gap in present systems and hence contributes to an enhancement of automated improvement of writing skills in the English language, with a sound and scalable solution.