Error Detection for Arabic Text Using Neural Sequence Labeling

The English language has, thus far, received the most attention in research concerning automatic grammar error correction and detection. However, these tasks have been less investigated for other languages. In this paper, we present the first experiments using neural network models for the task of error detection for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) text. We investigate several neural network architectures and report the evaluation results acquired by applying cross-validation on the data. All experiments involve a corpus we created and augmented. The corpus has 494 sentences and 620 sentences after augmentation. Our models achieved a maximum precision of 78.09%, recall of 83.95%, and F_0.5 score of 79.62% in the error detection task using SimpleRNN. Using an LSTM, we achieved a maximum precision of 79.21%, recall of 93.8%, and F_0.5 score of 79.16%. Finally, the best results were achieved using a BiLSTM with a maximum precision of 80.74%, recall of 85.73%, and F_0.5 score of 81.55%. We compared the results of the three models to a baseline, which is a commercially available Arabic grammar checker (Microsoft Word 2007). LSTM, BiLSTM, and SimpleRNN all outperformed the baseline in precision and F_0.5. Our work shows preliminary results, demonstrating that neural network architectures for error detection through sequence labeling can successfully be applied to Arabic text.