Language model based grammatical error correction without annotated training data

Abstract

Since the end of the CoNLL-2014 shared task on grammatical error correction (GEC), research into language model (LM) based approaches to GEC has largely stagnated. In this paper, we re-examine LMs in GEC and show that it is entirely possible to build a simple system that not only requires minimal annotated data (∼1000 sentences), but is also fairly competitive with several state-of-the-art systems. This approach should be of particular interest for languages where very little annotated training data exists, although we also hope to use it as a baseline to motivate future research.