Multilingual Grammatical Error Annotation: Combining Language-Agnostic Framework with Language-Specific Flexibility
This work addresses the need for standardized error annotation in multilingual grammatical error correction, enabling more consistent evaluation across languages, though it is incremental as it builds on existing frameworks like errant.
The paper tackles the problem of inconsistent grammatical error annotation across diverse languages by introducing a modular framework that combines language-gnostic and language-specific components, demonstrating adaptability in English, German, Czech, Korean, and Chinese to support scalable and interpretable GEC annotation.
Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) relies on accurate error annotation and evaluation, yet existing frameworks, such as $\texttt{errant}$, face limitations when extended to typologically diverse languages. In this paper, we introduce a standardized, modular framework for multilingual grammatical error annotation. Our approach combines a language-agnostic foundation with structured language-specific extensions, enabling both consistency and flexibility across languages. We reimplement $\texttt{errant}$ using $\texttt{stanza}$ to support broader multilingual coverage, and demonstrate the framework's adaptability through applications to English, German, Czech, Korean, and Chinese, ranging from general-purpose annotation to more customized linguistic refinements. This work supports scalable and interpretable GEC annotation across languages and promotes more consistent evaluation in multilingual settings. The complete codebase and annotation tools can be accessed at https://github.com/open-writing-evaluation/jp_errant_bea.