The First QALB Shared Task on Automatic Text Correction for Arabic

Abstract

We present a summary of the first shared task on automatic text correction for Arabic text. The shared task received 18 systems submissions from nine teams in six countries and represented a diversity of approaches. Our report includes an overview of the QALB corpus which was the source of the datasets used for training and evaluation, an overview of participating systems, results of the competition and an analysis of the results and systems.

Automatic Correction of Arabic Text: a Cascaded Approach

“…In This paper, we describe our system for automatic Arabic error correction shared task (QALB-2014 Shared Task on Automatic Correction of Arabic) as part of the Arabic NLP workshop (Mohit et al, 2014). Our system is composed of two main steps.…”

“…For punctuation recovery, we used two approaches, namely a simple statistical word-based system, and a conditional random fields (CRF) sequence labeler (Lafferty et al, 2001) that attempts to recover punctuation based on POS and word sequences. We performed all experiments on the QALB dataset (Zaghouani et al, 2014).…”

Human Evaluation of Grammatical Error Correction Systems

“…They were preceded by the HOO shared tasks (Dale and Kilgarriff, 2011;Dale et al, 2012). Shared tasks for other languages took place as well, including the QALB workshops for Arabic (Mohit et al, 2014) and NLP-TEA competitions for Chinese. These tasks use automatic metrics to determine the quality of the participating systems.…”

Proceedings of The 9th Linguistic Annotation Workshop

“…A subset of our L2 corpus will be used as part of the Second QALB Shared Task on Automatic Arabic Error Correction in conjunction with the ACL-2015 Workshop on Arabic NLP. 9 This shared task follows the success of the First QALB Shared Task held in conjunction with EMNLP-2014 Workshop on Arabic NLP (Mohit et al, 2014). In the future, we will extend our annotation guidelines to address machine translation output correction (i.e., manual post-editing).…”