Chinese Text Error Correction (CTEC) aims to detect and correct errors in the input text, which benefits human's daily life and various downstream tasks. Recent approaches mainly employ Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) to resolve CTEC task and achieve tremendous success. However, previous approaches suffer from issues of over-correction and under-correction, and the former is especially conspicuous in the precision-critical CTEC task. To mitigate the issue of overcorrection, we propose a novel model-agnostic progressive multitask learning framework for CTEC, named ProTEC, which guides a CTEC model to learn the task from easy to difficult. We divide CTEC task into three sub-tasks from easy to difficult: Error Detection, Error Type Identification, and Correction Result Generation. During the training process, ProTEC guides the model to learn text error correction progressively by incorporating these sub-tasks into a multi-task training objective. During the inference process, the model completes these sub-tasks in turn to generate the correction results. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses fully demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed framework.
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