Frequent grammar errors in standard Slovene include using an incorrect grammatical conjugation or number. Using the large language model SloBERTa, we have developed a new methodology for the machine detection of such problems and tested it on incorrect use of the accusative instead of the genitive case and the plural instead of the dual. We applied standard natural language processing tools for Slovenian to evaluate and modify word forms in the input sentences, such as morphosyntactic tagger CLASSLA-Stanza and Slovenian word form lexicon Sloleks. The proposed corrections are based on word form statistics when using masked word prediction with a large language model. Due to the lack of sufficient training data, we trained the prediction models on synthetically generated errors. We first evaluated the performance of machine correction on synthetic data and the Lektor corpus, and later on a newly developed evaluation dataset Šolar-Eval. The evaluation on the first two datasets showed the excellent performance of the developed methodology (more than 90% of detected synthetically introduced errors), while with Šolar-Eval it had a far worse performance (only 29.5% of the problems with the genitiveaccusative
grammatical case were detected, and just 11.4% of those with the dual-plural grammatical number). Overall, the results show the danger of overfitting to datasets and the importance of evaluating on purposefully designed authentic datasets, which are still rare for Slovene.
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