Driving Chinese Spelling Correction from a Fine-Grained Perspective

Linfeng Liu, Hongqiu Wu, Hai Zhao

Abstract: This paper explores the task: Chinese spelling correction (CSC), from a fine-grained perspec- tive by recognizing that existing evaluations lack nuanced typology for the spelling errors. This deficiency can create a misleading impres- sion of model performance, incurring an “in- visible” bottleneck hindering the advancement of CSC research. In this paper, we first cate- gorize spelling errors into six types and con- duct a fine-grained evaluation across a wide variety of models, including BERT-based mod- els and LLMs. Thus, we are able to pinpoint the underlying weaknesses of existing state-of- the-art models - utilizing contextual clues and handling co-existence of multiple typos, asso- ciated to contextual errors and multi-typo er- rors. However, these errors occur infrequently in conventional training corpus. Therefore, we introduce new error generation methods to aug- ment their occurrence, which can be leveraged to enhance the training of CSC models. We hope this work could provide fresh insight for future CSC research.