Multi-granularity Curriculum Learning for Chinese Spelling Correction in Legal Texts

Authors

  • Shijin Zhou School of Electronic Information Engineering, Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin, China
  • Yabo Liu School of Electronic Information Engineering, Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin, China

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15837/ijccc.2026.3.7213

Keywords:

Chinese Spelling Correction, Curriculum Learning, Legal Texts

Abstract

Chinese spelling correction (CSC) in legal texts faces unique challenges due to specialized terminology and complex error patterns. To address this gap, we propose Multi-granularity Curriculum Learning (mgCL), a novel two-level adaptive training framework that integrates batch-level and instance-level curricula. At the batch level, mgCL dynamically prioritizes training samples based on cross-entropy-derived difficulty, ensuring the model is exposed to increasingly complex examples in line with its evolving competence. At the instance level, mgCL leverages Monte Carlo Dropout to quantify prediction uncertainty and focus correction on challenging characters, particularly domain-specific legal terms. To facilitate evaluation in this domain, we also introduce CNLAW, a novel benchmark dataset for legal-domain CSC, featuring diverse error patterns and extensive legal terminology. Experiments present the effectiveness of our framework: on CNLAW, mgCL achieves 98.02% F1, outperforming the strong Rephrasing Language Model (ReLM) baseline (96.75%), and dramatically reduces the False Positive Rate (FPR) from 1.60% to 0.16%. Moreover, robust performance on the widely used SIGHAN15 benchmark confirms mgCL’s cross-domain generalization.

References

Yu, J.; Li, Z. (2014). Chinese spelling error detection and correction based on language model, pronunciation, and shape, Proceedings of The Third CIPS-SIGHAN Joint Conference on Chinese Language Processing, 220-223, 2014. https://doi.org/10.3115/v1/W14-6835

Wang, D.; Song, Y.; Li, J.; Han, J.; Zhang, H. (2018). A hybrid approach to automatic corpus generation for Chinese spelling check, Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2517-2527, 2018. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/D18-1273

Yu, L.-C.; Lee, L.-H.; Tseng, Y.-H.; Chen, H.-H. (2014). Overview of SIGHAN 2014 bake-off for Chinese spelling check, Proceedings of The Third CIPS-SIGHAN Joint Conference on Chinese Language Processing, 126-132, 2014. https://doi.org/10.3115/v1/W14-6820

Yu, L.-C.; Lee, L.-H.; Tseng, Y.-H.; Chen, H.-H. (2014). Overview of SIGHAN 2014 bake-off for Chinese spelling check, Proceedings of The Third CIPS-SIGHAN Joint Conference on Chinese Language Processing, 126-132, 2014. https://doi.org/10.3115/v1/W14-6820

Wang, X. et al. (2024). An empirical investigation of domain adaptation ability for chinese spelling check models, ICASSP 2024-2024 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), IEEE, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICASSP48485.2024.10448189

Wang, X. et al. (2024). An Unsupervised Domain-Adaptive Framework for Chinese Spelling Checking, ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing, 23(11): 1-16, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1145/3689821

Hong, Y.; Yu, X.; He, N.; Liu, N.; Liu, J. (2019). FASPell: A fast, adaptable, simple, powerful Chinese spell checker based on DAE-decoder paradigm, Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT 2019), 160-169, 2019. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/D19-5522

Wang, B.; Che, W.; Wu, D.; Wang, S.; Hu, G.; Liu, T. (2021). Dynamic connected networks for chinese spelling check, Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021, 2437-2446, 2021. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.findings-acl.216

Bai, J.; Bai, S.; Chu, Y. et al. (2023). Qwen technical report, arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.16609, 2023.

Achiam, J.; Adler, S.; Agarwal, S. et al. (2023). Gpt-4 technical report, arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.08774, 2023.

Liu, S.; Yang, T.; Yue, T.; Zhang, F.; Wang, D. (2021). PLOME: Pre-training with misspelled knowledge for Chinese spelling correction, Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), 2991-3000, 2021. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.233

Wu, H.; Zhang, H.; Xuan, R.; Song, D. (2024). Bi-DCSpell: A bidirectional detector-corrector interactive framework for Chinese spelling check, Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, 3974-3984, 2024. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.229

Liu, L.; Wu, H.; Zhao, H. (2024). Chinese Spelling Correction as Rephrasing Language Model, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 38(17): 18662-18670, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v38i17.29829

Bengio, Y.; Louradour, J.; Collobert, R. et al. (2009). Curriculum learning, Proceedings of the 26th annual international conference on machine learning, 41-48, 2009. https://doi.org/10.1145/1553374.1553380

Gan, Z.; Xu, H.; Zan, H. (2021). Self-supervised curriculum learning for spelling error correction, Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 3487- 3494, 2021. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.281

Zhou, Y.; Yang, B.; Wong, D. F.; Wan, Y.; Chao, L. S. (2020). Uncertainty-aware curriculum learning for neural machine translation, Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 6934-6944, 2020. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.620

Li, J.; Wang, Q.; Mao, Z.; Guo, J.; Yang, Y.; Zhang, Y. (2022). Improving Chinese spelling check by character pronunciation prediction: The effects of adaptivity and granularity, Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 4275-4286, 2022. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.287

Huang, H.; Ye, J.; Zhou, Q.; Li, Y.; Li, Y.; Zhou, F.; Zheng, H.-T. (2023). A frustratingly easy plug-and-play detection-andreasoning module for Chinese spelling check, Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, 11514-11525, 2023. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.771

Liang, Z.; Quan, X.; Wang, Q. (2023). Disentangled phonetic representation for Chinese spelling correction, Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 13509-13521, 2023. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.755

Huang, L.; Li, J.; Jiang, W.; Zhang, Z.; Chen, M.; Wang, S.; Xiao, J. (2021). Phmospell: Phonological and morphological knowledge guided chinese spelling check, Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, 5958-5967, 2021. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.464

Cheng, X.; Xu, W.; Chen, K.; Jiang, S.; Wang, F.; Wang, T.; Chu, W.; Qi, Y. (2020). Spellgcn: Incorporating phonological and visual similarities into language models for chinese spelling check, Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 871-881, 2020. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.81

Liu, C.; Zhang, K.; Jiang, J.; Liu, Z.; Tao, H.; Gao, M.; Chen, E. (2024). ARM: An alignment-andreplacement module for Chinese spelling check based on LLMs, Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 10156-10168, 2024. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.567

Xu, H.-D.; Li, Z.; Zhou, Q.; Li, C.; Wang, Z.; Cao, Y.; Huang, H.; Mao, X.-L. (2021). Read, listen, and see: Leveraging multimodal information helps Chinese spell checking, Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021, 716-728, 2021. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.findings-acl.64

Zhang, S.; Huang, H.; Liu, J.; Li, H. (2020). Spelling error correction with soft-masked BERT, Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 882-890, 2020. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.82

Zhu, C.; Ying, Z.; Zhang, B.; Mao, F. (2022). Mdcspell: A multi-task detector-corrector framework for chinese spelling correction, Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022, 1244-1253, 2022. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.findings-acl.98

Huang, H.; Ye, J.; Zhou, Q.; Li, Y. (2023). A Frustratingly Easy Plug-and-Play Detection-and- Reasoning Module for Chinese Spelling Check, Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, 11514-11525, 2023. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.771

Wu, H.; Zhang, H.; Xuan, R.; Song, D. (2024). Bi-DCSpell: A Bi-directional Detector-Corrector Interactive Framework for Chinese Spelling Check, findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, 3974-3984, 2024. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.229

Sarafianos, N.; Giannakopoulos, T.; Nikou, C.; Kakadiaris, I. A. (2018). Curriculum learning of visual attribute clusters for multi-task classification, Pattern Recognition, 94-108, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patcog.2018.02.028

Wang, Y.; Gan, W.; Yang, J.; Wu, W.; Yan, J. (2019). Dynamic Curriculum Learning for Imbalanced Data Classification, Proceedings of IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision, 5016-5025, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCV.2019.00512

Guo, S.; Huang, W.; Zhang, H.; Zhuang, C.; Dong, D.; Scott, M. R.; Huang, D. (2018). CurriculumNet: Weakly Supervised Learning from Large-Scale Web Images, Proceedings of Computer Vision - ECCV 2018: 15th European Conference, 139-154, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01249-6_9

Cirik, V.; Hovy, E.; Morency, L. P. (2016). Visualizing and understanding curriculum learning for long short-term memory networks, arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.06204, 2016.

Liu, C.; He, S.; Liu, K.; Zhao, J. (2018). Curriculum learning for natural answer generation, Proceedings of the 27th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 4223-4229, 2018. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2018/587

Kocmi, T.; Bojar. (2017). Curriculum Learning and Minibatch Bucketing in Neural Machine Translation, Proceedings of the International Conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, 379-386, 2017. https://doi.org/10.26615/978-954-452-049-6_050

Thompson, B.; Khayrallah, H.; Anastasopoulos, A.; McCarthy, A. D.; Duh, K.; Marvin, R.; McNamee, P.; Gwinnup, J.; Anderson, T.; Koehn, P. (2018). Freezing Subnetworks to Analyze Domain Adaptation in Neural Machine Translation, Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Research Papers, 124-132, 2018. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W18-6313

Zhang, X.; Shapiro, P.; Kumar, G.; McNamee, P.; Carpuat, M.; Duh, K. (2019). Curriculum Learning for Domain Adaptation in Neural Machine Translation, Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, 1903-1915, 2019. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/N19-1189

Wang, W.; Caswell, I.; Chelba, C. (2019). Dynamically Composing Domain-Data Selection with Clean-Data Selection by "Co-Curricular Learning" for Neural Machine Translation, Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 1282-1292, 2019. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/P19-1123

Kumar, G.; Foster, G.; Cherry, C.; Krikun, M. (2019). Reinforcement Learning Based Curriculum Optimization for Neural Machine Translation, Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2054-2061, 2019. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/N19-1208

Zhang, X.; Kumar, G.; Khayrallah, H.; Murray, K.; Gwinnup, J.; Martindale, M. J.; McNamee, P.; Duh, K.; Carpuat, M. (2018). An Empirical Exploration of Curriculum Learning for Neural Machine Translation, CoRR, abs/1811.00739, 2018.

Platanios, E. A.; Stretcu, O.; Neubig, G.; Poczos, B.; Mitchell, T. (2019). Competence-Based Curriculum Learning for Neural Machine Translation, Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologiesm, 1162-1172, 2019. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/N19-1119

Additional Files

Published

2026-05-26

Most read articles by the same author(s)

Obs.: This plugin requires at least one statistics/report plugin to be enabled. If your statistics plugins provide more than one metric then please also select a main metric on the admin's site settings page and/or on the journal manager's settings pages.