MixEdit: Revisiting Data Augmentation and Beyond for Grammatical Error Correction
This work addresses data scarcity in GEC, an incremental improvement with domain-specific impact for natural language processing applications.
The paper tackled the problem of understanding how data augmentation improves Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) models by introducing interpretable measures (Affinity and Diversity) and proposing MixEdit, a dynamic augmentation approach that improved performance on English and Chinese datasets without extra monolingual corpora.
Data Augmentation through generating pseudo data has been proven effective in mitigating the challenge of data scarcity in the field of Grammatical Error Correction (GEC). Various augmentation strategies have been widely explored, most of which are motivated by two heuristics, i.e., increasing the distribution similarity and diversity of pseudo data. However, the underlying mechanism responsible for the effectiveness of these strategies remains poorly understood. In this paper, we aim to clarify how data augmentation improves GEC models. To this end, we introduce two interpretable and computationally efficient measures: Affinity and Diversity. Our findings indicate that an excellent GEC data augmentation strategy characterized by high Affinity and appropriate Diversity can better improve the performance of GEC models. Based on this observation, we propose MixEdit, a data augmentation approach that strategically and dynamically augments realistic data, without requiring extra monolingual corpora. To verify the correctness of our findings and the effectiveness of the proposed MixEdit, we conduct experiments on mainstream English and Chinese GEC datasets. The results show that MixEdit substantially improves GEC models and is complementary to traditional data augmentation methods.