Grammar Error Correction (GEC) using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)

In this project, we fine-tune a Sequence-to-Label model derived from GECToR using DRL.

The contributions of this project are as follows:

1. A basic RL environment for GEC task.
2. A batched-version of REINFORCE algorithm to optimize the GEC model.
3. A simple action-search algorithm to allow safe exploration during RL training.

Setup

Conda

The command below will setup a conda environment with required packages and submodules.

git clone --recurse-submodules git@github.com:RajK853/DRL-GEC.git
cd DRL-GEC
conda env create -f environment.yml

Datasets

In this project, we used the following public GEC datasets:

1. PIE Synthetic Dataset
2. W&I+LOCNESS Dataset

Data Processing

To JSON format

The RL environment uses the datasets in the JSON format.

To process the W&I+LOCNESS dataset from M2 format into the JSON format, use the following command:

python m2_to_json.py --m2_path M2_PATH --json_path JSON_PATH [--min_len MIN_LEN] [--max_len MAX_LEN] [--min_sim MIN_SIM] [--only_proper_sent] [--spell_check] [--remove_ellipsis]

Description of the arguments are as follows:

--m2_path M2_PATH         # Path to the input M2 file
--json_path JSON_PATH     # Path to the output JSON files

# Optional Arguments
--min_len MIN_LEN       # Min number of tokens in original sentence
--max_len MAX_LEN       # Max number of tokens in original sentence
--min_sim MIN_SIM       # Min avg similarity between original and references
--only_proper_sent      # Allow only proper reference sentences
--spell_check           # Check spelling errors in original and references
--remove_ellipsis       # Remove (source) sentences with ellipsis

Use the notebooks/PIE_to_JSON.ipynb notebook to process the PIE Synthetic dataset into the JSON format. This notebook adapts the m2_to_json.py scripts to process parallel dataset into JSON format.

Please note that RL environment will look for a data.json file (data_filtered.json for only solvable examples) in the data/processed/dataset_name directory.

To GECToR format

We use the preprocessing script from GECToR to prepare datasets for Supervised Learning (SL) method.

Please change the following line in the gector/utils/preprocess_data.py beforehand.

Original:

from helpers import write_lines, ...

Modified:

from .helpers import write_lines, ...

To convert datasets into GECToR format, use the following command:

python json_to_gector.py --json_path JSON_PATH [--output_path OUTPUT_PATH] [--chunk_size CHUNK_SIZE]

Description of the arguments are as follows:

--json_path JSON_PATH      # Path to the input JSON file
--output_path OUTPUT_PATH  # Path to the output GECToR file

# Optional Arguments
--chunk_size CHUNK_SIZE    # Chunk size during processing

Only Solvable Examples

The Sequence-to-Label model cannot correct sentences if the required label is not present in the set of labels used by the model. Therefore, we have added a script to filter out unsolvable sentences from the JSON file using the following command:

python filter_unsolvable.py --json_path JSON_PATH [--label_path LABEL_PATH]

Description of the arguments are as follows:

--json_path JSON_PATH      # Path to the input JSON file

# Optional Arguments
--label_path LABEL_PATH    # Path to the label vocabulary

This will generate a filtered JSON file with the _filtered suffix i.e. data.json -> data_filtered.json.

Training

The models of our project uses the train_sl.py and train_rl.py scripts to train a model using SL and RL respectively. These scripts take training configurations in the YAML format. Configurations we used in our project to pre-train and fine-tune the models are present in the configs subdirectory. Use the following commands to pre-train and fine-tune the models using SL and RL.

python train_sl.py configs/sl_pretrain.yaml   # SL Pre-Training
python train_sl.py configs/sl_finetune.yaml   # SL Fine-Tuning
python train_rl.py configs/rl_finetune.yaml   # RL Fine-Tuning

Evaluation

In this project, we can evaluate models using following GEC benchmarks:

1. CONLL-2014
2. BEA-2019
3. JFLEG

We have separate scripts to evaluate using each benchmark. The evaluate.py script will evaluate our models on all the above benchmarks.

python evaluate --model_dir MODEL_DIR [--label_path LABEL_PATH] [--max_iter MAX_ITER] [--force]

Description of the arguments are as follows:

--model_dir MODEL_DIR    # Path to directory with the trained models `model-best.pt` and `model-last.pt`

# Optional Arguments
--label_path LABEL_PATH  # Path to the label vocabulary
--max_iter MAX_ITER      # Max number of prediction iteration
--force                  # Override previous evaluation results

To evaluate on the BEA-2019, upload the zipped model outputs to their Codalab competition here.