Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) faces a critical challenge concerning explainabil-ity, notably when GEC systems are designed for language learners. Existing research predominantly focuses on explaining grammatical errors extracted in advance, thus neglecting the relationship between explanations and corrections. To address this gap, we introduce EXGEC, a unified explainable GEC framework that integrates explanation and correction tasks in a generative manner, advocating that these tasks mutually reinforce each other. Experiments have been conducted on EXPECT, a recent human-labeled dataset for explainable GEC, comprising around 20k samples. Moreover, we detect significant noise within EXPECT, potentially compromising model training and evaluation. Therefore, we introduce an alternative dataset named EXPECT - denoised, ensuring a more objective framework for training and evaluation. Results on various NLP models (BART, T5, and Llama3) show that EXGEC models surpass single-task baselines in both tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.

Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) attracts more research interest recently. While models achieve consistent performance gains in DocRE, their underlying decision rules are still understudied: Do they make the right predictions according to rationales? In this paper, we take the first step toward answering this question and then introduce a new perspective on comprehensively evaluating a model. Specifically, we first conduct annotations to provide the rationales considered by humans in DocRE. Then, we conduct investigations and reveal the fact that: In contrast to humans, the representative state-of-the-art (SOTA) models in DocRE exhibit different decision rules. Through our proposed RE-specific attacks, we next demonstrate that the significant discrepancy in decision rules between models and humans severely damages the robustness of models and renders them inapplicable to real-world RE scenarios. After that, we introduce mean average precision (MAP) to evaluate the understanding and reasoning capabilities of models. According to the extensive experimental results, we finally appeal to future work to consider evaluating both performance and the understanding ability of models for the development of their applications. We make our annotations and code publicly available.

Grammatical error correction systems improve written communication by detecting and correcting language mistakes. To help language learners better understand why the GEC system makes a certain correction, the causes of errors (evidence words) and the corresponding error types are two key factors. To enhance GEC systems with explanations, we introduce EXPECT, a large dataset annotated with evidence words and grammatical error types. We propose several baselines and analysis to understand this task. Furthermore, human evaluation verifies our explainable GEC system's explanations can assist second-language learners in determining whether to accept a correction suggestion and in understanding the associated grammar rule.