The WikEd Error Corpus: A Corpus of Corrective Wikipedia Edits and its Application to Grammatical Error Correction

This paper introduces the freely available WikEd Error Corpus. We describe the data mining process from Wikipedia revision histories, corpus content and format. The corpus consists of more than 12 million sentences with a total of 14 million edits of various types. As one possible application, we show that WikEd can be successfully adapted to improve a strong baseline in a task of grammatical error correction for English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) learners’ writings by 2.63%. Used together with an ESL error corpus, a composed system gains 1.64% when compared to the ESL-trained system.