This paper studies Chinese Spelling Correction (CSC), which aims to detect
and correct potential spelling errors in a given sentence. Current
state-of-the-art methods regard CSC as a sequence tagging task and fine-tune
BERT-based models on sentence pairs. However, we note a critical flaw in the
process of tagging one character to another, that the correction is excessively
conditioned on the error. This is opposite from human mindset, where
individuals rephrase the complete sentence based on its semantics, rather than
solely on the error patterns memorized before. Such a counter-intuitive
learning process results in the bottleneck of generalizability and
transferability of machine spelling correction. To address this, we propose
$Rephrasing Language Modeling$ (ReLM), where the model is trained to rephrase
the entire sentence by infilling additional slots, instead of
character-to-character tagging. This novel training paradigm achieves the new
state-of-the-art results across fine-tuned and zero-shot CSC benchmarks,
outperforming previous counterparts by a large margin. Our method also learns
transferable language representation when CSC is jointly trained with other
tasks.

本研究探讨了中文拼写纠错，提出了一种新的训练方法 Rephrasing Language Modeling，通过重新构造整个句子而非逐字符标记的方式来纠正拼写错误，取得了在细调和零样本测试中的最新最佳表现，超越了之前的方法，并能在与其他任务联合训练时学习到可迁移的语言表示。