Precision--Recall Trade-off on the Inference Level for LLMs in Grammatical Error Correction

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have recently been adopted for Grammatical Error Correction (GEC), achieving strong performance via both full fine-tuning and prompt-based approaches. As probabilistic sequence models, LLMs expose inference-time parameters that directly modify token generation behavior; however, their potential for controlling GEC-specific trade-offs has not been systematically studied. In this work, we investigate decoding strategies for grammatical error correction. We show that the repetition penalty parameter enables controllable adjustment of the precision--recall trade-off at inference time, without modifying the model architecture, training procedure, or prompt. Through experiments on standard GEC benchmarks, we demonstrate that repetition-penalty-based decoding enables inference-time control of the precision--recall balance, conceptually related to methods previously proposed for sequence-to-sequence GEC models, such as Align-and-Predict Decoding (APD), while remaining simple and broadly applicable to existing LLMs that expose inference-time decoding penalties.