# Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Multi-domain Chinese Spelling Correction by Multi-stage Knowledge Transfer Framework

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11422 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11422/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Gradient Episodic Memory for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08840/) (2017)
- [Knowledge Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05525/) (2020)
- [Learning to Learn without Forgetting by Maximizing Transfer and Minimizing Interference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11910/) (2018)
- [Spelling Error Correction with Soft-Masked BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07421/) (2020)
- [Are we ready for a new paradigm shift? A Survey on Visual Deep MLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04060/) (2021)
- [SpellGCN: Incorporating Phonological and Visual Similarities into Language Models for Chinese Spelling Check](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14166/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Read, Listen, and See: Leveraging Multimodal Information Helps Chinese Spell Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12306/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Towards Real-World Writing Assistance: A Chinese Character Checking Benchmark with Faked and Misspelled Characters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11268/) (2023)
- [Automatic Context Pattern Generation for Entity Set Expansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08087/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Masked Language Modeling for Chinese Spelling Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17721/) (2023)
- [Chinese Spelling Correction as Rephrasing Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08796/) (2023)
- [A Frustratingly Easy Plug-and-Play Detection-and-Reasoning Module for Chinese Spelling Check](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09119/) (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, 4 of 4)

- [Teaching According to Talents! Instruction Tuning LLMs with Competence-Aware Curriculum Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13790/) (2025)
- [PERL: Pinyin Enhanced Rephrasing Language Model for Chinese ASR N-best Error Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03230/) (2024)
- [CL2GEC: A Multi-Discipline Benchmark for Continual Learning in Chinese Literature Grammatical Error Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13672/) (2025)
- [Auxiliary-Hyperparameter-Free Sampling: Entropy Equilibrium for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00789/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Chinese Spelling Correction (CSC) aims to detect and correct spelling errors in given sentences. Recently, multi-domain CSC has gradually attracted the attention of researchers because it is more practicable. In this paper, we focus on the key flaw of the CSC model when adapting to multi-domain scenarios: the tendency to forget previously acquired knowledge upon learning new domain-specific knowledge (i.e., catastrophic forgetting). To address this, we propose a novel model-agnostic Multi-stage Knowledge Transfer (MKT) framework, which utilizes a continuously evolving teacher model for knowledge transfer in each domain, rather than focusing solely on new domain knowledge. It deserves to be mentioned that we are the first to apply continual learning methods to the multi-domain CSC task. Experiments prove the effectiveness of our proposed method, and further analyses demonstrate the importance of overcoming catastrophic forgetting for improving the model performance.