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Fast Grammatical Error Correction using BERT

Code and Pre-trained models accompanying our paper "Parallel Iterative Edit Models for Local Sequence Transduction" (EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)

PIE is a BERT based architecture for local sequence transduction tasks like Grammatical Error Correction. Unlike the standard approach of modeling GEC as a task of translation from "incorrect" to "correct" language, we pose GEC as local sequence editing task. We further reduce local sequence editing problem to a sequence labeling setup where we utilize BERT to non-autoregressively label input tokens with edits. We rewire the BERT architecture (without retraining) specifically for the task of sequence editing. We find that PIE models for GEC are 5 to 15 times faster than existing state of the art architectures and still maintain a competitive accuracy. For more details please check out ourEMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 paper

@inproceedings{awasthi-etal-2019-parallel,    title = "Parallel Iterative Edit Models for Local Sequence Transduction",    author = "Awasthi, Abhijeet  and      Sarawagi, Sunita  and      Goyal, Rasna  and      Ghosh, Sabyasachi  and      Piratla, Vihari",    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)",    month = nov,    year = "2019",    address = "Hong Kong, China",    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",    url = "https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/D19-1435",    doi = "10.18653/v1/D19-1435",    pages = "4259--4269",}

• All the public GEC datasets used in the paper can be obtained fromhere
• Synthetically created datasets (perturbed version of 1 billion word corpus) divided into 5 parts to independently train 5 different ensembles. (all the ensembles are further finetuned using the public GEC datasets mentioned above.)

• PIE as reported in the paper
  • trained on a Synethically created GEC dataset starting with BERT's initialization
  • finetuned further on Lang8, NUCLE and FCE datasets
• Inference using the pretrained PIE ckpt
  • Copy the pretrained checkpoint files provided above to PIE_ckpt directory
  • Your PIE_ckpt directory should contain
    • bert_config.json
    • multi_round_infer.sh
    • pie_infer.sh
    • pie_model.ckpt.data-00000-of-00001
    • pie_model.ckpt.index
    • pie_model.ckpt.meta
    • vocab.txt
  • Run:$ ./multi_round_infer.sh from PIE_ckpt directory
  • NOTE: If you are using cloud-TPUs for inference, move the PIE_ckpt directory to the cloud bucket and change the paths in pie_infer.sh and multi_round_infer.sh accordingly

An example usage of code in described in the directory "example_scripts".

• preprocess.sh
  • Extracts common insertions from a sample training data in the "scratch" directory
  • converts the training data in the form of incorrect tokens and aligned edits
• pie_train.sh
  • trains a pie model using the converted training data
• multi_round_infer.sh
  • uses a trained PIE model to obtain edits for incorrect sentences
  • does 4 rounds of iterative editing
  • uses conll-14 test sentences
• m2_eval.sh
  • evaluates the final output usingm2scorer
• end_to_end.sh
  • describes the use of pre-processing, training, inference and evaluation scripts end to end.
• More information in README.md inside "example_scripts"

Pre processing and Edits related

• seq2edits_utils.py
  • contains implementation of edit-distance algorithm.
  • cost for substitution modified as per section A.1 in the paper.
  • Adapted frombelambert's implimentation
• get_edit_vocab.py : Extracts common insertions (\Sigma_a set as described in paper) from a parallel corpus
• get_seq2edits.py : Extracts edits aligned to input tokens
• tokenize_input.py : tokenize a file containing sentences. token_ids obtained go as input to the model.
• opcodes.py : A class where members are all possible edit operations
• transform_suffixes.py: Contains logic for suffix transformations
• tokenization.py : Similar to BERT's implementation, with some GEC specific changes

PIE model (usesimplementation of BERT of bert in Tensorflow)

• word_edit_model.py: Implementation of PIE for learning from a parallel corpous of incorrect tokens and aligned edits.
  • logit factorization logic (Keep flag use_bert_more=True to enable logit factorization)
  • parallel sequence labeling
• modeling.py : Same as in BERT's implementation
• modified_modeling.py
  • Rewires attention mask to obtain representations of candidate appends and replacements
  • Used for logit factorization.
• optimization.py : Same as in BERT's implementation

Post processing

• apply_opcode.py
  • Applies inferred edits from the PIE model to the incorrect sentences.
  • Handles punctuations and spacings as per requirements of a standard dataset (INFER_MODE).
  • Contains some obvious rules for captialization etc.

Creating synthetic GEC dataset

• errorify directory contains the scripts we used for perturbing the one-billion-word corpus

This research was partly sponsored by a Google India AI/ML Research Award and Google PhD Fellowship in Machine Learning. We gratefully acknowledge Google's TFRC program for providing us Cloud-TPUs. Thanks toVarun Patil for helping us improve the speed of pre-processing and synthetic-data generation pipelines.