The CUED's Grammatical Error Correction Systems for BEA-2019

Abstract: We describe two entries from the Cambridge University Engineering Department to the BEA 2019 Shared Task on grammatical error correction. Our submission to the low-resource track is based on prior work on using finite state transducers together with strong neural LLMs. Our system for the restricted track is a purely neural system consisting of neural LLMs and neural machine translation models trained with back-translation and a combination of checkpoint averaging and fine-tuning -- without the help of any additional tools like spell checkers. The latter system has been used inside a separate system combination entry in cooperation with the Cambridge University Computer Lab.