Abstract: Shortage of available training data is holding back progress in the area of automated error detection. This paper investigates two alternative methods for artificially generating writing errors, in order to create additional resources. We propose treating error generation as a machine translation task, where grammatically correct text is translated to contain errors. In addition, we explore a system for extracting textual patterns from an annotated corpus, which can then be used to insert errors into grammatically correct sentences. Our experiments show that the inclusion of artificially generated errors significantly improves error detection accuracy on both FCE and CoNLL 2014 datasets.

Introduction: Writing errors can occur in many different forms – from relatively simple punctuation and determiner errors, to mistakes including word tense and form, incorrect collocations and erroneous idioms. Automatically identifying all of these errors is a challenging task, especially as the amount of available annotated data is very limited. Rei2016 showed that while some error detection algorithms perform better than others, it is additional training data that has the biggest impact on improving performance. Being able to generate realistic artificial data would allow for any grammatically correct text to be transformed into annotated examples containing writing errors, producing large amounts of additional training examples. Supervised error generation systems would also provide an efficient method for anonymising the source corpus – error statistics from a private corpus can be aggregated and applied to a different target text, obscuring sensitive information in the original examination scripts. However, the task of creating incorrect data is somewhat more difficult than might initially appear – naive methods for error generation can create data that does not resemble natural errors, thereby making downstream systems learn misleading or uninformative patterns. Previous work on artificial error generation (AEG) has focused on specific error types, such as prepositions and determiners BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 , or noun number errors BIBREF2 . Felice2014a investigated the use of linguistic information when generating artificial data for error correction, but also restricting the approach to only five error types. There has been very limited research on generating artificial data for all types, which is important for general-purpose error detection systems. For example, the error types investigated by Felice2014a cover only 35.74% of all errors present in the CoNLL 2014 training dataset, providing no additional information for the majority of errors. In this paper, we investigate two supervised approaches for generating all types of artificial errors. We propose a framework for generating errors based on statistical machine translation (SMT), training a model to translate from correct into incorrect sentences. In addition, we describe a method for learning error patterns from an annotated corpus and transplanting them into error-free text. We evaluate the effect of introducing artificial data on two error detection benchmarks. Our results show that each method provides significant improvements over using only the available training set, and a combination of both gives an absolute improvement of 4.3% in INLINEFORM0 , without requiring any additional annotated data.  

Question: What are their results on both datasets?
Answer: Combining  pattern based and Machine translation approaches gave the best overall F0.5 scores. It was 49.11 for FCE dataset  , 21.87 for the first annotation of  CoNLL-14, and 30.13 for the second annotation of CoNLL-14.