An Unsupervised Domain-Adaptive Framework for Chinese Spelling Checking

Abstract

Chinese Spelling Check (CSC) is a meaningful task in the area of Natural Language Processing (NLP), which aims at detecting spelling errors in Chinese texts and then correcting these errors. Current typical Chinese Spelling Check models have shown impressive performance in general datasets with the help of pretrained language models such as BERT, but suffer great perform loss in downstream tasks with domain-specific terms because they are primarily trained on general corpora. To verify the cross-domain adaptation ability of these models, we build three new datasets with abundant domain-specific terms on financial, medical, and legal domains and conduct empirical investigations on them in the corresponding domain-specific test datasets to verify the cross-domain adaptation ability. In response to the poor performance of the existing models, we propose a framework named uChecker which utilizes unsupervised method in spelling error detection and correction. Experiment results prove that uChecker can perform well in domain-specific test datasets while not losing its performance in the general domain.