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Subword-Level Grammatical Error Correction: A Universal Approach

https://doi.org/10.15514/ISPRAS-2026-38(3)-11

Abstract

In this study, we propose a fully automatic methodology for data generation, correction rule vocabulary construction, and Sequence Tagging model training that specifically targets Grammatical Error Correction. Our approach operates at the SentencePiece subword level, using basic transformations – keep, append, replace and delete – that are universally applicable across languages, thereby eliminating the need for grammar-specific operations. By using the Levenshtein algorithm to generate ground truth corrections and editorial prescriptions, we obtained a completely invariant and language-independent dataset generation process. We applied our method to the Sequence Tagging model GECToR and achieved comparable quality results for English with F0.5 scores of 62.4 on the CoNLL-2014 (test set) and 61.9 on the BEA-2019 (test set), without manual rule design or manual annotation of error spans/types. The results indicate that subword-level universal edits can provide a practical alternative to grammar-specific operations, while requiring only parallel correction data.

About the Authors

Ildar Airatovich KHABUTDINOV
Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology
Russian Federation

PhD student at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), Senior Developer in the GigaChat team at Sber. Research interests: natural language processing, large language models, neural network training and fine-tuning methods, language model alignment methods, distributed training.



Andrey Valerievich GRABOVOY
Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, V. A. Trapeznikov Institute of Control Sciences of Russian Academy of Sciences
Russian Federation

Cand. Sci. (Phys.-Math,), senior scientist of the Laboratory 42 of Data Mining at the V.A. Trapeznikov Institute of Control Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 2025, Associate Professor at the Department of Intelligent Systems, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (National Research University). Research Interests: include pattern recognition, prior distributions of model parameters, model distillations, nlp.



Yury Viktorovich CHEKHOVICH
V. A. Trapeznikov Institute of Control Sciences of Russian Academy of Sciences
Russian Federation

Cand. Sci (Math). Head of the Laboratory 42 of Data Mining at the V.A. Trapeznikov Institute of Control Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 2025. Research Interest: machine learning, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, pattern recognition, high-load applications.



Alexandr Sergeevich KILDYAKOV
V. A. Trapeznikov Institute of Control Sciences of Russian Academy of Sciences
Russian Federation

Scientist of the Laboratory 42 of Data Mining at the V.A. Trapeznikov Institute of Control Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 2025. Research Interest: machine learning, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, pattern recognition, high-load applications.



Andrey Alexandrovich IVAKHNENKO
V. A. Trapeznikov Institute of Control Sciences of Russian Academy of Sciences
Russian Federation

Cand. Sci. (Phys.-Math,), Scientist of the Laboratory 42 of Data Mining at the V.A. Trapeznikov Institute of Control Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 2025. Research interests: optimization of information systems architecture, machine learning, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, pattern recognition, high-load applications..



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Review

For citations:


KHABUTDINOV I.A., GRABOVOY A.V., CHEKHOVICH Yu.V., KILDYAKOV A.S., IVAKHNENKO A.A. Subword-Level Grammatical Error Correction: A Universal Approach. Proceedings of the Institute for System Programming of the RAS (Proceedings of ISP RAS). 2026;38(3):187-196. https://doi.org/10.15514/ISPRAS-2026-38(3)-11



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ISSN 2079-8156 (Print)
ISSN 2220-6426 (Online)