Abstract

There has been an increased interest in low-resource approaches to automatic grammatical error correction. We introduce Minimally-Augmented Grammatical Error Correction (MAGEC) that does not require any error-labelled data. Our unsupervised approach is based on a simple but effective synthetic error generation method based on confusion sets from inverted spell-checkers. In low-resource settings, we outperform the current state-of-the-art results for German and Russian GEC tasks by a large margin without using any real error-annotated training data. When combined with labelled data, our method can serve as an efficient pre-training technique