# RobustGEC: Robust Grammatical Error Correction Against Subtle Context Perturbation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07299 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07299/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [A Multitask, Multilingual, Multimodal Evaluation of ChatGPT on Reasoning, Hallucination, and Interactivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04023/) (2023)
- [Siren's Song in the AI Ocean: A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01219/) (2023)
- [Adversarial Examples for Evaluating Reading Comprehension Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07328/) (2017)
- [Just Train Twice: Improving Group Robustness without Training Group Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09044/) (2021)
- [BERT-ATTACK: Adversarial Attack Against BERT Using BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09984/) (2020)
- [Learning the Difference that Makes a Difference with Counterfactually-Augmented Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12434/) (2019)
- [PAWS: Paraphrase Adversaries from Word Scrambling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01130/) (2019)
- [AllenNLP: A Deep Semantic Natural Language Processing Platform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07640/) (2018)
- [MixText: Linguistically-Informed Interpolation of Hidden Space for Semi-Supervised Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12239/) (2020)
- [GECToR -- Grammatical Error Correction: Tag, Not Rewrite](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12592/) (2020)
- [An Empirical Study on Robustness to Spurious Correlations using Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06778/) (2020)
- [A Simple Recipe for Multilingual Grammatical Error Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03830/) (2021)
- [Measure and Improve Robustness in NLP Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08313/) (2021)
- [JFLEG: A Fluency Corpus and Benchmark for Grammatical Error Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04066/) (2017)
- [Is ChatGPT a Highly Fluent Grammatical Error Correction System? A Comprehensive Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01746/) (2023)
- [Parallel Iterative Edit Models for Local Sequence Transduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02893/) (2019)
- [ChatGPT or Grammarly? Evaluating ChatGPT on Grammatical Error Correction Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13648/) (2023)
- [Seq2Edits: Sequence Transduction Using Span-level Edit Operations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11136/) (2020)
- [Approaching Neural Grammatical Error Correction as a Low-Resource Machine Translation Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05940/) (2018)
- [Synthetic Data Generation for Grammatical Error Correction with Tagged Corruption Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13318/) (2021)
- [Grammatical Error Correction: A Survey of the State of the Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05166/) (2022)
- [Exploring Effectiveness of GPT-3 in Grammatical Error Correction: A Study on Performance and Controllability in Prompt-Based Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18156/) (2023)
- [Stronger Baselines for Grammatical Error Correction Using Pretrained Encoder-Decoder Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11849/) (2020)
- [MuCGEC: a Multi-Reference Multi-Source Evaluation Dataset for Chinese Grammatical Error Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10994/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Who Wrote This? The Key to Zero-Shot LLM-Generated Text Detection Is GECScore](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04286/) (2024)
- [REFeREE: A REference-FREE Model-Based Metric for Text Simplification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17640/) (2024)
- [Beyond Hard Samples: Robust and Effective Grammatical Error Correction with Cycle Self-Augmenting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13321/) (2023)
- [Learning from Mistakes: Self-correct Adversarial Training for Chinese Unnatural Text Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17279/) (2024)
- [Tibyan Corpus: Balanced and Comprehensive Error Coverage Corpus Using ChatGPT for Arabic Grammatical Error Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04588/) (2024)
- [CoCoGEC: Counterfactual Generation for Robust Grammatical Error Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15069/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) systems play a vital role in assisting people with their daily writing tasks. However, users may sometimes come across a GEC system that initially performs well but fails to correct errors when the inputs are slightly modified. To ensure an ideal user experience, a reliable GEC system should have the ability to provide consistent and accurate suggestions when encountering irrelevant context perturbations, which we refer to as context robustness. In this paper, we introduce RobustGEC, a benchmark designed to evaluate the context robustness of GEC systems. RobustGEC comprises 5,000 GEC cases, each with one original error-correct sentence pair and five variants carefully devised by human annotators. Utilizing RobustGEC, we reveal that state-of-the-art GEC systems still lack sufficient robustness against context perturbations. In addition, we propose a simple yet effective method for remitting this issue.