How Far are We from Fully Automatic High Quality Grammatical Error Correction?

In this paper, we first explore the role of inter-annotator agreement statistics in grammatical error correction and conclude that they are less informative in fields where there may be more than one correct answer. We next created a dataset of 50 student essays, each corrected by 10 different annotators for all error types, and investigated how both human and GEC system scores vary when different combinations of these annotations are used as the gold standard. Upon learning that even humans are unable to score higher than 75% F-0.5, we propose a new metric based on the ratio between human and system performance. We also use this method to investigate the extent to which annotators agree on certain error categories, and find that similar results can be obtained from a smaller subset of just 10 essays.