ChatGPT for Arabic Grammatical Error Correction
This addresses grammatical error correction for Arabic, a low-resource language, but is incremental as it builds on existing LLM and synthetic data methods.
The paper tackled the problem of Arabic grammatical error correction using large language models, finding that GPT-4 achieved up to 65.49 F1 score with expert prompting, and developed a method with synthetic data that set new state-of-the-art results of 72.19% and 73.26 F1 on standard benchmarks.
Recently, large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned to follow human instruction have exhibited significant capabilities in various English NLP tasks. However, their performance in grammatical error correction (GEC) tasks, particularly in non-English languages, remains significantly unexplored. In this paper, we delve into abilities of instruction fine-tuned LLMs in Arabic GEC, a task made complex due to Arabic's rich morphology. Our findings suggest that various prompting methods, coupled with (in-context) few-shot learning, demonstrate considerable effectiveness, with GPT-4 achieving up to $65.49$ F\textsubscript{1} score under expert prompting (approximately $5$ points higher than our established baseline). This highlights the potential of LLMs in low-resource settings, offering a viable approach for generating useful synthetic data for model training. Despite these positive results, we find that instruction fine-tuned models, regardless of their size, significantly underperform compared to fully fine-tuned models of significantly smaller sizes. This disparity highlights a substantial room for improvements for LLMs. Inspired by methods from low-resource machine translation, we also develop a method exploiting synthetic data that significantly outperforms previous models on two standard Arabic benchmarks. Our work sets new SoTA for Arabic GEC, with $72.19\%$ and $73.26$ F$_{1}$ on the 2014 and 2015 QALB datasets, respectively.