# Rethinking the Roles of Large Language Models in Chinese Grammatical Error Correction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11420 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11420/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 38 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Feb 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-benchmarks-and-evaluation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [BloombergGPT: A Large Language Model for Finance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17564/) (2023)
- [GECToR -- Grammatical Error Correction: Tag, Not Rewrite](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12592/) (2020)
- [HuaTuo: Tuning LLaMA Model with Chinese Medical Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06975/) (2023)
- [A comprehensive evaluation of ChatGPT's zero-shot Text-to-SQL capability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13547/) (2023)
- [StructBERT: Incorporating Language Structures into Pre-training for Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04577/) (2019)
- [Is ChatGPT a Highly Fluent Grammatical Error Correction System? A Comprehensive Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01746/) (2023)
- [CPT: A Pre-Trained Unbalanced Transformer for Both Chinese Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05729/) (2021)
- [Are we ready for a new paradigm shift? A Survey on Visual Deep MLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04060/) (2021)
- [The Past Mistake is the Future Wisdom: Error-driven Contrastive Probability Optimization for Chinese Spell Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00991/) (2022)
- [On the (In)Effectiveness of Large Language Models for Chinese Text Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09007/) (2023)
- [Evaluation Metrics in the Era of GPT-4: Reliably Evaluating Large Language Models on Sequence to Sequence Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13800/) (2023)
- [EcomGPT: Instruction-tuning Large Language Models with Chain-of-Task Tasks for E-commerce](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06966/) (2023)
- [Mengzi: Towards Lightweight yet Ingenious Pre-trained Models for Chinese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06696/) (2021)
- [LatEval: An Interactive LLMs Evaluation Benchmark with Incomplete Information from Lateral Thinking Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10855/) (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)
- [Multi-Task Instruction Tuning of LLaMa for Specific Scenarios: A Preliminary Study on Writing Assistance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13225/) (2023)
- [Learning from the Dictionary: Heterogeneous Knowledge Guided Fine-tuning for Chinese Spell Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10320/) (2022)
- [Linguistic Rules-Based Corpus Generation for Native Chinese Grammatical Error Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10442/) (2022)
- [Prompting open-source and commercial language models for grammatical error correction of English learner text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07702/) (2024)
- [GrammarGPT: Exploring Open-Source LLMs for Native Chinese Grammatical Error Correction with Supervised Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13923/) (2023)
- [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)
- [SeqGPT: An Out-of-the-box Large Language Model for Open Domain Sequence Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10529/) (2023)
- [A Frustratingly Easy Plug-and-Play Detection-and-Reasoning Module for Chinese Spelling Check](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09119/) (2023)
- [GEE! Grammar Error Explanation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09517/) (2023)
- [Contextual Similarity is More Valuable than Character Similarity: An Empirical Study for Chinese Spell Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09217/) (2022)
- [Correct Like Humans: Progressive Learning Framework for Chinese Text Error Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17447/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [LLM Agents for Education: Advances and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11733/) (2025)
- [Refine Knowledge of Large Language Models via Adaptive Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07184/) (2025)
- [AdmTree: Compressing Lengthy Context with Adaptive Semantic Trees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04550/) (2025)
- [Cognitive Mismatch in Multimodal Large Language Models for Discrete Symbol Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18472/) (2026)
- [Exploring the Implicit Semantic Ability of Multimodal Large Language Models: A Pilot Study on Entity Set Expansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00330/) (2024)
- [Corrections Meet Explanations: A Unified Framework for Explainable Grammatical Error Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15261/) (2025)
- [FEANEL: A Benchmark for Fine-Grained Error Analysis in K-12 English Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22883/) (2025)
- [Scoring Edit Impact in Grammatical Error Correction via Embedded Association Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06573/) (2026)
- [A Layered Taxonomy for Chinese Learner Grammatical Error Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02153/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely studied by researchers for their roles in various downstream NLP tasks. As a fundamental task in the NLP field, Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) aims to correct all potential grammatical errors in the input sentences. Previous studies have shown that LLMs' performance as correctors on CGEC remains unsatisfactory due to its challenging task focus. To promote the CGEC field to better adapt to the era of LLMs, we rethink the roles of LLMs in the CGEC task so that they can be better utilized and explored in CGEC. Considering the rich grammatical knowledge stored in LLMs and their powerful semantic understanding capabilities, we utilize LLMs as explainers to provide explanation information for the CGEC small models during error correction to enhance performance. We also use LLMs as evaluators to bring more reasonable CGEC evaluations, thus alleviating the troubles caused by the subjectivity of the CGEC task. In particular, our work is also an active exploration of how LLMs and small models better collaborate in downstream tasks. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses on widely used datasets verify the effectiveness of our thinking intuition and the proposed methods.