Towards the Development of Balanced Synthetic Data for Correcting Grammatical Errors in Arabic: An Approach Based on Error Tagging Model and Synthetic Data Generating Model

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel approach for generating balanced synthetic Arabic data for grammatical error correction by combining error tagging with a back-translation model, achieving state-of-the-art results.

Contribution

It introduces a combined error tagging and synthetic data generation framework specifically tailored for Arabic GEC, improving diversity and accuracy.

Findings

Error tagging model achieved 94.42% F1, state-of-the-art.

Synthetic data improved GEC performance to 79.36% F1.

Generated over 30 million synthetic sentence pairs.

Abstract

Synthetic data generation is widely recognized as a way to enhance the quality of neural grammatical error correction (GEC) systems. However, current approaches often lack diversity or are too simplistic to generate the wide range of grammatical errors made by humans, especially for low-resource languages such as Arabic. In this paper, we will develop the error tagging model and the synthetic data generation model to create a large synthetic dataset in Arabic for grammatical error correction. In the error tagging model, the correct sentence is categorized into multiple error types by using the DeBERTav3 model. Arabic Error Type Annotation tool (ARETA) is used to guide multi-label classification tasks in an error tagging model in which each sentence is classified into 26 error tags. The synthetic data generation model is a back-translation-based model that generates incorrect sentences by appending error tags before the correct sentence that was generated from the error tagging model using the ARAT5 model. In the QALB-14 and QALB-15 Test sets, the error tagging model achieved 94.42% F1, which is state-of-the-art in identifying error tags in clean sentences. As a result of our syntactic data training in grammatical error correction, we achieved a new state-of-the-art result of F1-Score: 79.36% in the QALB-14 Test set. We generate 30,219,310 synthetic sentence pairs by using a synthetic data generation model.