Mexico

Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) are commonly used across all levels of math education since they can be deployed and graded at a large scale. A critical component of MCQs is the distractors, i.e., incorrect answers crafted to reflect student errors or misconceptions. Automatically generating them in math MCQs, e.g., with large language models, has been challenging. In this work, we propose a novel method to enhance the quality of generated distractors through overgenerate-and-rank, training a ranking model to predict how likely distractors are to be selected by real students. Experimental results on a real-world dataset and human evaluation with math teachers show that our ranking model increases alignment with human-authored distractors, although human-authored ones are still preferred over generated ones.

NAACL 2024

Improving Automated Distractor Generation for Math Multiple-choice Questions with Overgenerate-and-rank

math multiple-choice-question

machine learning

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
The opportunity to present at NAACL should not depend on a researcher’s travel budget, or their family status. This is why it is so important to make virtual participation at NAACL as good an experience as possible – but we want to also provide a good experience for in-person participants. As a community, we are still working out the best way to do that. This year at NAACL, we are trying out a big virtual poster session ahead of the conference, with the hope that this will make make for a lively and interactive experience. At the same time, we are reducing virtual oral presentations, which seem to be particularly tricky to make to work well. A big thanks to the NAACL program chairs and to Luciana Benotti for all their ideas and work to improve the virtual experience. And participants, virtual as well as in-person: Please let us know what worked for you and what didn’t, so we can continue to improve hybrid conferences. 
 
I have been lucky to work with many amazing people. Without their insight, dedication and patience, and without the many hours of work they put in, NAACL would not have been possible. A huge thank you to the program chairs Helena Gomez, Kevin Duh, and Steve Bethard – you are the best! 
 
Finally, I would like to thank all authors, invited speakers and panelists, area chairs and reviewers, the volunteers organizing and chairing sessions, and all attendees, in-person and virtual. Thank you for helping us make NAACL 2024 come to life. 
 
Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
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2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

workshop paper

Natural language generation tools are powerful and effective for generating content. However, language models are known to display bias and fairness issues, making them impractical to deploy for many use cases. We here focus on how fairness issues impact automatically generated test content, which can have stringent requirements to ensure the test measures only what it was intended to measure. Specifically, we review test content generated for a large-scale standardized English proficiency test with the goal of identifying content that only pertains to a certain subset of the test population as well as content that has the potential to be upsetting or distracting to some test takers. Issues like these could inadvertently impact a test taker's score and thus should be avoided. This kind of content does not reflect the more commonly-acknowledged biases, making it challenging even for modern models that contain safeguards. We build a dataset of 601 generated texts annotated for fairness and explore a variety of methods for classification: fine-tuning, topic-based classification, and prompting, including few-shot and self-correcting prompts. We find that combining prompt self-correction and few-shot learning performs best, yielding an F1 score of 0.79 on our held-out test set, while much smaller BERT- and topic-based models have competitive performance on out-of-domain data.

Avoiding Taylor Swift: Identifying Fairness Issues in Automatically Generated Testing Content

Natural language processing (NLP) technology has rapidly improved automated grammatical error correction (GEC) tasks, and the GEC community has begun to explore document-level revision. However, there are two major obstacles to going beyond automated \textit{sentence-level} GEC to NLP-based document-level revision support: (1) there are few public corpora with document-level revisions annotated by professional editors, and (2) it is infeasible to obtain all possible references and evaluate revision quality using such references because there are infinite revision possibilities. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a new document revision corpus, Text Revision of ACL papers (TETRA), in which multiple professional editors have revised academic papers sampled from the ACL anthology. This corpus enables us to focus on document-level and paragraph-level edits, such as edits related to coherence and consistency. Additionally, as a case study using the TETRA corpus, we investigate reference-less and interpretable methods for meta-evaluation to detect quality improvements according to document revisions. We show the uniqueness of TETRA compared with existing document revision corpora and demonstrate that a fine-tuned pre-trained language model can discriminate the quality of documents after revision even when the difference is subtle.

Towards Automated Document Revision: Grammatical Error Correction, Fluency Edits, and Beyond

The paper focuses on investigating vocabulary usage for AI and human-generated text. We define vocabulary usage in two ways: structural differences and keyword differences. Structural differences are evaluated by converting text into Vocabulary-Managment Profiles, initially used for discourse analysis. Through VMPs, we can treat the text data as a time series, allowing an evaluation by implementing Dynamic time-warping distance measures and subsequently deriving similarity scores to provide an indication of whether the structural dynamics in AI texts resemble human texts. To analyze keywords, we use a measure that emphasizes frequency and dispersion to source 'key' keywords. A qualitative approach is then applied, noting thematic differences between human and AI writing.

Evaluating Vocabulary Usage in LLMs

Individual feedback can help students improve their essay writing skills. However, the manual effort required to provide such feedback limits individualization in practice. Automatically-generated essay feedback may serve as an alternative to guide students at their own pace, convenience, and desired frequency. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in generating coherent and contextually relevant text. Yet, their ability to provide helpful essay feedback is unclear. This work explores several prompting strategies for LLM-based zero-shot and few-shot generation of essay feedback. Inspired by Chain-of-Thought prompting, we study how and to what extent automated essay scoring (AES) can benefit the quality of generated feedback. We evaluate both the AES performance that LLMs can achieve with prompting only and the helpfulness of the generated essay feedback. Our results suggest that tackling AES and feedback generation jointly improves AES performance. However, while our manual evaluation emphasizes the quality of the generated essay feedback, the impact of essay scoring on the generated feedback remains low ultimately.

Exploring LLM Prompting Strategies for Joint Essay Scoring and Feedback Generation

Teaching foreign languages and fostering language awareness in subject matter teaching requires a profound knowledge of grammar structures. Yet, while Large Language Models can act as tutors, it is unclear how effectively they can control grammar in generated text and adapt to learner needs. In this study, we investigate the ability of these models to exemplify pedagogically relevant grammar patterns, detect instances of grammar in a given text, and constrain text generation to grammar characteristic of a proficiency level. Concretely, we (1) evaluate the ability of GPT3.5 and GPT4 to generate example sentences for the standard English Grammar Profile CEFR taxonomy using few-shot in-context learning, (2) train BERT-based detectors with these generated examples of grammatical patterns, and (3) control the grammatical complexity of text generated by the open Mistral model by ranking sentence candidates with these detectors. We show that the grammar pattern instantiation quality is accurate but too homogeneous, and our classifiers successfully detect these patterns. A GPT-generated dataset of almost 1 million positive and negative examples for the English Grammar Profile is released with this work. With our method, Mistral's output significantly increases the number of characteristic grammar constructions on the desired level, outperforming GPT4. This showcases how language domain knowledge can enhance Large Language Models for specific education needs, facilitating their effective use for intelligent tutor development and AI-generated materials. 
Code, models, and data are available at https://github.com/dominikglandorf/LLM-grammar.

Towards Fine-Grained Pedagogical Control over English Grammar Complexity in Educational Text Generation

In this work, we investigate the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for automated short answer scoring. 
We test zero-shot and few-shot settings, and compare with fine-tuned models and a supervised upper-bound, across three diverse datasets. 
Our results, in zero-shot and few-shot settings, show that LLMs perform poorly in these settings: LLMs have difficulty with tasks that require complex reasoning or domain-specific knowledge. While the models show promise on general knowledge tasks. The fine-tuned model come close to the supervised results but are still not feasible for application, highlighting potential overfitting issues. 

Overall, our study highlights the challenges and limitations of LLMs in short answer scoring and indicates that there currently seems to be no basis for applying LLMs for short answer scoring.

LLMs in Short Answer Scoring: Limitations and Promise of Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Approaches

This study examines the effect of grammatical features in automatic essay scoring (AES). We use two kinds of grammatical features as input to an AES model: (1) grammatical items that writers used correctly in essays, and (2) the number of grammatical errors. Experimental results show that grammatical features improve the performance of AES models that predict the holistic scores of essays. Multi-task learning with the holistic and grammar scores, alongside using grammatical features, resulted in a larger improvement in model performance. We also show that a model using grammar abilities estimated using Item Response Theory (IRT) as the labels for the auxiliary task achieved comparable performance to when we used grammar scores assigned by human raters. In addition, we weight the grammatical features using IRT to consider the difficulty of grammatical items and writers' grammar abilities. We found that weighting grammatical features with the difficulty led to further improvement in performance.

Automated Essay Scoring Using Grammatical Variety and Errors with Multi-Task Learning and Item Response Theory

Knowledge tracing, the process of estimating students' mastery over concepts from their past performance and predicting future outcomes, often relies on binary pass/fail predictions. This hinders the provision of specific feedback by failing to diagnose precise errors. We present an error-tracing model for learning programming that advances traditional knowledge tracing by employing multi-label classification to forecast exact errors students may generate. Through experiments on a real student dataset, we validate our approach and compare it to two baseline knowledge-tracing methods. We demonstrate an improved ability to predict specific errors, for first attempts and for subsequent attempts at individual problems.

Error Tracing in Programming: A Path to Personalised Feedback

The interplay of cultural and linguistic elements that characterizes metaphorical language poses a substantial challenge for both human comprehension and machine processing. This challenge goes beyond monolingual settings and becomes particularly complex in translation, even more so in automatic translation. We present VOLIMET, a corpus of 2,916 parallel sentences containing gold standard alignments of metaphorical verb-object pairs and their literal paraphrases, e.g., tackle/address question, from English to German and French. On the one hand, the parallel nature of our corpus enables us to explore monolingual patterns for metaphorical vs. literal uses in English. On the other hand, we investigate different aspects of cross-lingual translations into German and French and the extent to which metaphoricity and literalness in the source language are transferred to the target languages. Monolingually, our findings reveal clear preferences in using metaphorical or literal uses of verb-object pairs. Cross-lingually, we observe a rich variability in translations as well as different behaviors for our two target languages.

VOLIMET: A Parallel Corpus of Literal and Metaphorical Verb-Object Pairs for English–German and English–French

The task of toxicity detection is still a relevant task, especially in the context of safe and fair LMs development. Nevertheless, labeled binary toxicity classification corpora are not available for all languages, which is understandable given the resource-intensive nature of the annotation process. Ukrainian, in particular, is among the languages lacking such resources. To our knowledge, there has been no existing toxicity classification corpus in Ukrainian. In this study, we aim to fill this gap by investigating cross-lingual knowledge transfer techniques and creating labeled corpora by: (i)~translating from an English corpus, (ii)~filtering toxic samples using keywords, and (iii)~annotating with crowdsourcing. We compare LLMs prompting and other cross-lingual transfer approaches with and without fine-tuning offering insights into the most robust and efficient baselines.

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Avoiding Taylor Swift: Identifying Fairness Issues in Automatically Generated Testing Content

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Exploring Automated Distractor Generation for Math Multiple-choice Questions via Large Language Models