# The Past Mistake is the Future Wisdom: Error-driven Contrastive Probability Optimization for Chinese Spell Checking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.00991 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00991/

## Key facts

- Cited by 56 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [Revisiting Pre-Trained Models for Chinese Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13922/) (2020)
- [Spelling Error Correction with Soft-Masked BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07421/) (2020)
- [SpellGCN: Incorporating Phonological and Visual Similarities into Language Models for Chinese Spelling Check](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14166/) (2020)
- [Read, Listen, and See: Leveraging Multimodal Information Helps Chinese Spell Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12306/) (2021)
- [Pretraining with Contrastive Sentence Objectives Improves Discourse Performance of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10389/) (2020)
- [CLINE: Contrastive Learning with Semantic Negative Examples for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00440/) (2021)
- [Exploration and Exploitation: Two Ways to Improve Chinese Spelling Correction Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14813/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [A Survey on Recent Advances in LLM-Based Multi-turn Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18013/) (2024)
- [TableBench: A Comprehensive and Complex Benchmark for Table Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09174/) (2024)
- [On the (In)Effectiveness of Large Language Models for Chinese Text Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09007/) (2023)
- [LatEval: An Interactive LLMs Evaluation Benchmark with Incomplete Information from Lateral Thinking Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10855/) (2023)
- [Learning from the Dictionary: Heterogeneous Knowledge Guided Fine-tuning for Chinese Spell Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10320/) (2022)
- [Contrastive Learning with Hard Negative Entities for Entity Set Expansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07789/) (2022)
- [General and Domain Adaptive Chinese Spelling Check with Error Consistent Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10929/) (2022)
- [Linguistic Rules-Based Corpus Generation for Native Chinese Grammatical Error Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10442/) (2022)
- [Towards Real-World Writing Assistance: A Chinese Character Checking Benchmark with Faked and Misspelled Characters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11268/) (2023)
- [When LLMs Meet Cunning Texts: A Fallacy Understanding Benchmark for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11100/) (2024)
- [DAST: Context-Aware Compression in LLMs via Dynamic Allocation of Soft Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11493/) (2025)
- [A Frustratingly Easy Plug-and-Play Detection-and-Reasoning Module for Chinese Spelling Check](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09119/) (2023)
- [Refine Knowledge of Large Language Models via Adaptive Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07184/) (2025)
- [Contextual Similarity is More Valuable than Character Similarity: An Empirical Study for Chinese Spell Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09217/) (2022)
- [Disentangled Phonetic Representation for Chinese Spelling Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14783/) (2023)
- [Correct Like Humans: Progressive Learning Framework for Chinese Text Error Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17447/) (2023)
- [MESED: A Multi-modal Entity Set Expansion Dataset with Fine-grained Semantic Classes and Hard Negative Entities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14878/) (2023)
- [Embracing Ambiguity: Improving Similarity-oriented Tasks with Contextual Synonym Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10997/) (2022)
- [Active Relation Discovery: Towards General and Label-aware Open Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04215/) (2022)
- [Rethinking the Roles of Large Language Models in Chinese Grammatical Error Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11420/) (2024)
- [MCSCSet: A Specialist-annotated Dataset for Medical-domain Chinese Spelling Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11720/) (2022)
- [AdmTree: Compressing Lengthy Context with Adaptive Semantic Trees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04550/) (2025)
- [EvoConfig: Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Systems for Efficient Autonomous Environment Configuration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16489/) (2026)
- [Cognitive Mismatch in Multimodal Large Language Models for Discrete Symbol Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18472/) (2026)
- [ML-LMCL: Mutual Learning and Large-Margin Contrastive Learning for Improving ASR Robustness in Spoken Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11375/) (2023)
- [CLEME: Debiasing Multi-reference Evaluation for Grammatical Error Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10819/) (2023)
- [Error-Robust Retrieval for Chinese Spelling Check](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07843/) (2022)
- [Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Multi-domain Chinese Spelling Correction by Multi-stage Knowledge Transfer Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11422/) (2024)
- [From Token to Line: Enhancing Code Generation with a Long-Term Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07433/) (2025)
- [TangramPuzzle: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models with Compositional Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16520/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) aims to detect and correct Chinese spelling errors, which are mainly caused by the phonological or visual similarity. Recently, pre-trained language models (PLMs) promote the progress of CSC task. However, there exists a gap between the learned knowledge of PLMs and the goal of CSC task. PLMs focus on the semantics in text and tend to correct the erroneous characters to semantically proper or commonly used ones, but these aren't the ground-truth corrections. To address this issue, we propose an Error-driven COntrastive Probability Optimization (ECOPO) framework for CSC task. ECOPO refines the knowledge representations of PLMs, and guides the model to avoid predicting these common characters through an error-driven way. Particularly, ECOPO is model-agnostic and it can be combined with existing CSC methods to achieve better performance. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses on SIGHAN datasets demonstrate that ECOPO is simple yet effective.
