Posted by Tony Mak, Software Engineer, Google Research and Simon Tong, Principal Engineer, Google Research, Brain Team
Despite the success and widespread adoption of smartphones, using them to compose longer pieces of text is still quite cumbersome. As one writes, grammatical errors can often creep into the text (especially undesirable in formal situations), and correcting these errors can be time consuming on a small display with limited controls.
To address some of these challenges, we are launching a grammar correction feature that is directly built into Gboard on Pixel 6 that works entirely on-device to preserve privacy, detecting and suggesting corrections for grammatical errors while the user is typing. Building such functionality required addressing a few key obstacles: memory size limitations, latency requirements, and handling partial sentences. Currently, the feature is capable of correcting English sentences (we plan to expand to more languages in the near future) and available on almost any app with Gboard1.
Gboard suggests how to correct an ungrammatical sentence as the user types.
Model Architecture
We trained a sequence-to-sequence neural network to take an input sentence (or a sentence prefix) and output the grammatically correct version — if the original text is already grammatically correct, the output of the model is identical to its input, indicating that no corrections are needed. The model uses a hybrid architecture that combines a Transformer encoder with an LSTM decoder, a combination that provides a good balance of quality and latency.
Overview of the grammatical error correction (GEC) model architecture.
Mobile devices are constrained by limited memory and computational power, which make it more difficult to build a high quality grammar checking system. There are a few techniques we use to build a small, efficient, and capable model.
Shared embedding: Because the input and output of the model are structurally similar (e.g., both are text in the same language),
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