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arXiv · 2609.21231

Beyond Reference-Based Evaluation: Reward Models for Meta-Evaluation of Grammatical Error Correction

Ruotian Wu·Bill E. Johnson·Gene Saunders·Osama Hamzeh·Ankit Vadehra·Pascal Poupart
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Abstract

Reference-based metrics for Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) such as M$^2$ and ERRANT assume that the reference set enumerates all valid edits, and therefore often penalize corrections that are grammatical and meaning-preserving but phrased differently. We introduce RM-EVAL, a reward model trained on human preference data from SEEDA, as a reference-free meta-evaluator that predicts human-like quality judgments at both full-sequence and partial-sequence levels. Beyond evaluation, we show that the same reward model can be used as a learning signal to improve GEC generation via Reward-Guided Text Generation (RGTG), which keeps a base GEC model frozen and performs online, reward-driven decoding. Across SEEDA, RM-EVAL achieves strong agreement with human rankings, and RGTG yields consistent gains in reward and external validation, demonstrating a unified framework for both assessing and enhancing GEC systems without relying on gold references.

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Ruotian Wu, Bill E. Johnson, Gene Saunders, Osama Hamzeh, Ankit Vadehra, Pascal Poupart. 2026-09-18. Beyond Reference-Based Evaluation: Reward Models for Meta-Evaluation of Grammatical Error Correction. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21231

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