Canada

By aligning the functional components derived from the activations of transformer models trained for Automated Essay Scoring (AES) with external knowledge such as human-understandable feature groups, the proposed method improves the interpretability of a Longformer AES system and provides tools for performing such analyses on further neural AES systems. The analysis focuses on models trained to score essays based on organization, main idea, support, and language. The findings provide insights into the models&#39; decision-making processes, biases, and limitations, contributing to the development of more transparent and reliable AES systems.

ACL 2023

Towards Extracting and Understanding the Implicit Rubrics of Transformer Based Automatic Essay Scoring Models

automated essay scoring

black box

neural network

interpretability

transformer

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

By aligning the functional components derived from the activations of transformer models trained for Automated Essay Scoring (AES) with external knowledge such as human-understandable feature groups, the proposed method improves the interpretability of a Longformer AES system and provides tools for performing such analyses on further neural AES systems. The analysis focuses on models trained to score essays based on organization, main idea, support, and language. The findings provide insights into the models' decision-making processes, biases, and limitations, contributing to the development of more transparent and reliable AES systems.

workshop paper

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience. 
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

This paper analyzes winning solutions from the Feedback Prize competition series hosted from 2021-2022. The competitions sought to improve Assisted Writing Feedback Tools (AWFTs) by crowdsourcing Large Language Model (LLM) solutions for evaluating student writing. The winning LLM-based solutions are freely available for incorporation into educational applications, but the models need to be assessed for performance and other factors. This study reports the performance accuracy of Feedback Prize-winning models based on demographic factors such as student race/ethnicity, economic disadvantage, and English Language Learner status. Two competitions are analyzed. The first, which focused on identifying discourse elements, demonstrated minimal bias based on students' demographic factors. However, the second competition, which aimed to predict discourse effectiveness, exhibited moderate bias.


Analyzing Bias in Large Language Model Solutions for Assisted Writing Feedback Tools: Lessons from the Feedback Prize Competition Series

Reading comprehension is a crucial skill in many aspects of education, including language learning, cognitive development, and fostering early literacy skills in children. Automated answer-aware reading comprehension question generation has significant potential to scale up learner support in educational activities. One key technical challenge in this setting is that there can be multiple questions, sometimes very different from each other, with the same answer; a trained question generation method may not necessarily know which question human educators would prefer. To address this challenge, we propose 1) a data augmentation method that enriches the training dataset with diverse questions given the same context and answer and 2) an overgenerate-and-rank method to select the best question from a pool of candidates. We evaluate our method on the FairytaleQA dataset, showing a 5% absolute improvement in ROUGE-L over the best existing method. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in generating harder, "implicit" questions, where the answers are not contained in the context as text spans.

Improving Reading Comprehension Question Generation with Data Augmentation and Overgenerate-and-rank

The standard definition generation task requires to automatically produce mono-lingual definitions (e.g., English definitions for English words), but ignores that the generated definitions may also consist of unfamiliar words for language learners. In this work, we propose a novel task of Trans-Lingual Definition Generation (TLDG), which aims to generate definitions in another language, i.e., the native speaker’s language. Initially, we explore the unsupervised manner of this task and build up a simple implementation of fine-tuning the multilingual machine translation model. Then, we develop two novel methods, Prompt Combination and Contrastive Prompt Learning, for further enhancing the quality of the generation. Our methods are evaluated against the baseline Pipeline method in both rich- and low-resource settings, and we empirically establish its superiority in generating higher-quality trans-lingual definitions. The ablation studies and further analysis are also conducted to provide more hints on this new task.

Assisting Language Learners: Automated Trans-Lingual Definition Generation via Contrastive Prompt Learning

The ability to revise in response to feedback is critical to students' writing success. In the case of argument writing in specific, identifying whether an argument revision (AR) is successful or not is a complex problem because AR quality is dependent on the overall content of an argument. For example, adding the same evidence sentence could strengthen or weaken existing claims in different argument contexts (ACs). To address this issue we developed Chain-of-Thought prompts to facilitate ChatGPT-generated ACs for AR quality predictions. The experiments on two corpora, our annotated elementary essays and existing college essays benchmark, demonstrate the superiority of the proposed ACs over baselines.

Predicting the Quality of Revisions in Argumentative Writing

In intelligent language tutoring systems, student dashboards should display the learning progress and performance and support the navigation through the learning content. Designing an interface that transparently offers information on students’ learning in relation to specific learning targets while linking to the overarching functional goal, that motivates and organizes the practice in current foreign language teaching, is challenging. This becomes even more difficult in systems that adaptively expose students to different learning material and individualize system interactions. If such a system is used in an ecologically valid setting of blended learning, this generates additional requirements to incorporate the needs of students and teachers for control and customizability.
We present the conceptual design of a student dashboard for a task-based, user-adaptive intelligent language tutoring system intended for use in real-life English classes in secondary schools. We highlight the key challenges and spell out open questions for future research.

Reconciling Adaptivity and Task Orientation in the Student Dashboard of an Intelligent Language Tutoring System

Improving conversational proficiency is a key target for students learning a new language. While acquiring conversational proficiency, students must learn the linguistic mechanisms of Repair and Grounding (R&G) to negotiate meaning and find common ground with their interlocutor so conversational breakdowns can be resolved. Task-oriented Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDS) have long been sought as a tool to hone conversational proficiency. However, the R&G patterns for language learners interacting with a task-oriented spoken dialogue system are not reflected explicitly in any existing datasets. Therefore, to move the needle in Spoken Dialogue Systems for language learning we present GrounDialog: an annotated dataset of spoken conversations where we elicit a rich set of R&G patterns.

GrounDialog: A Dataset for Repair and Grounding in Task-oriented Spoken Dialogues for Language Learning

Lectures are a learning experience for both students and teachers. Students learn from teachers about the subject material, while teachers learn from students about how to refine their instruction. However, online student feedback is unstructured and abundant, making it challenging for teachers to learn and improve. We take a step towards tackling this challenge. First, we contribute a dataset for studying this problem: SIGHT is a large dataset of 288 math lecture transcripts and 15,784 comments collected from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) YouTube channel. Second, we develop a rubric for categorizing feedback types using qualitative analysis. Qualitative analysis methods are powerful in uncovering domain-specific insights, however they are costly to apply to large data sources. To overcome this challenge, we propose a set of best practices for using large language models (LLMs) to cheaply classify the comments at scale. We observe a striking correlation between the model's and humans' annotation: Categories with consistent human annotations (>0.9 inter-rater reliability, IRR) also display higher human-model agreement (>0.7), while categories with less consistent human annotations (0.7-0.8 IRR) correspondingly demonstrate lower human-model agreement (0.3-0.5). These techniques uncover useful student feedback from thousands of comments, costing around $0.002 per comment. We conclude by discussing exciting future directions on using online student feedback and improving automated annotation techniques for qualitative research.

SIGHT: A Large Annotated Dataset on Student Insights Gathered from Higher Education Transcripts

This paper addresses the problem of providing automatic feedback on orthographic errors in handwritten text. Despite the availability of automatic error detection systems, the practical problem of digitizing the handwriting remains. Current handwriting recognition (HWR) systems produce highly accurate transcriptions but normalize away the very errors that are essential for providing useful feedback, e.g. ortho- graphic errors. Our contribution is twofold: First, we create a comprehensive dataset of handwritten text with transcripts retaining or- thographic errors by transcribing 1,350 pages from the German learner dataset FD-LEX. Second, we train a simple HWR system on our dataset, allowing it to transcribe words with orthographic errors. Thereby, we evaluate the effect of different dictionaries on recognition output, highlighting the importance of addressing spelling errors in these dictionaries.

Recognizing Learner Handwriting Retaining Orthographic Errors for Enabling Fine-Grained Error Feedback

Creating high-quality multiple-choice items requires careful attention to several factors, including ensuring that there is only one correct option, that options are independent of each other, that there is no overlap between options, and that each option is plausible. This attention is reflected in the explanations provided by human item-writers for each option. This study aimed to compare the creation of explanations of multiple-choice item options for reading comprehension by ChatGPT with those created by humans. We used two context-dependent multiple-choice item sets created based on Evidence‐Centered Design. Results indicate that ChatGPT is capable of producing explanations with different type of information that are comparable to those created by humans. So that humans could benefit from additional information given to enhance their explanations. We conclude that ChatGPT ability to generate explanations for multiple-choice item options in reading comprehension tests is comparable to that of humans.

You've Got a Friend in ... a Language Model? A Comparison of Explanations of Multiple-Choice Items of Reading Comprehension between ChatGPT and Humans

We introduce a novel technique for automatically summarizing lecture videos using large language models such as GPT-3 and we present a user study investigating the effects on the studying experience when automatic summaries are added to lecture videos. We test students under different conditions and find that the students who are shown a summary next to a lecture video perform better on quizzes designed to test the course materials than the students who have access only to the video or the summary. Our findings suggest that adding automatic summaries to lecture videos enhances the learning experience. Qualitatively, students preferred summaries when studying under time constraints.

Next from ACL 2023

Analyzing Bias in Large Language Model Solutions for Assisted Writing Feedback Tools: Lessons from the Feedback Prize Competition Series

Similar lecture

Graph-Based Multi-Trait Essay Scoring