Improving Autoregressive Grammatical Error Correction with Non-autoregressive Models

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) aims to correct grammatical errors in sentences. We find that autoregressive models tend to assign low probabilities to tokens that need corrections. Here we introduce additional signals to the training of GEC models so that these systems can learn to better predict at ambiguous positions. To do this, we use a non-autoregressive model as an auxiliary model, and develop a new regularization term of training by considering the difference in predictions between the autoregressive and nonautoregressive models. We experiment with this method on both English and Chinese GEC tasks. Experimental results show that our GEC system outperforms the baselines on all the data sets significantly.