Evaluation of grammatical error correction (GEC) systems has primarily focused on essays written by non-native learners of English, which however is only part of the full spectrum of GEC applications. We aim to broaden the target domain of GEC and release CWEB, a new benchmark for GEC consisting of website text generated by English speakers of varying levels of proficiency. Website data is a common and important domain that contains far fewer grammatical errors than learner essays, which we show presents a challenge to state-of-the-art GEC systems. We demonstrate that a factor behind this is the inability of systems to rely on a strong internal language model in low error density domains. We hope this work shall facilitate the development of open-domain GEC models that generalize to different topics and genres.
@article{arxiv.2010.07574,
title = {Grammatical Error Correction in Low Error Density Domains: A New Benchmark and Analyses},
author = {Simon Flachs and Ophélie Lacroix and Helen Yannakoudakis and Marek Rei and Anders Søgaard},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.07574},
year = {2020}
}