Mexico

This paper presents the results of our participation in the BEA 2024 shared task on the automated prediction of item difficulty and item response time (APIDIRT), hosted by the NBME (National Board of Medical Examiners). During this task, practice multiple-choice questions from the United States Medical Licensing Examination® (USMLE®) were shared, and research teams were tasked with devising systems capable of predicting the difficulty and average response time for new exam questions.

Our team, part of the interdisciplinary itec research group, participated in the task. We extracted linguistic features and clinical embeddings from question items and tested various modeling techniques, including statistical regression, machine learning, language models, and ensemble methods. Surprisingly, simpler
models such as Lasso and random forest regression, utilizing principal component features from linguistic and clinical embeddings, outperformed more complex models. In the competition, our random forest model ranked 4th out of 43 submissions for difficulty prediction, while the Lasso model secured the 2nd position out of 34 submissions for response time prediction. Further analysis suggests that had we submitted the Lasso model for difficulty prediction, we would have achieved an even higher ranking. We also observed that predicting response time is easier than predicting difficulty, with features such as item length, type, exam step, and analytical thinking influencing response time prediction more significantly.

NAACL 2024

ITEC at BEA 2024 Shared Task: Predicting Difficulty and Response Time of Medical Exam Questions with Statistical, Machine Learning, and Language Models

bio_clinicalbert

taales

clinical models

response time prediction

difficulty prediction

apidirt

biomedical models

liwc

ensemble models

statistical modeling

linguistic features

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 
*You can read the full Welcome message in the [Conference Handbook (downloadable)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H1NvW0VASQjkSCYgw3mr-3l4yYDSxz6B/view?usp=sharing)*

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2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

workshop paper

With increased attention to connecting science topics to real-world contexts, like issues of social justice, teachers need support to assess student progress in explaining such issues. In this work, we explore the robustness of NLP-based automatic content scoring models that provide insight into student ability to integrate their science and social justice ideas in two different environmental science contexts. We leverage encoder-only transformer models to capture the degree to which students explain a science phenomenon, understand the intersecting justice issues, and integrate their understanding of science and social justice. We developed models training on data from each of the contexts as well as from a combined dataset. We found that the models developed in one context generate educationally useful scores in the other context. The model trained on the combined dataset performed as well as or better than the models trained on separate datasets in most cases. Quadratic weighted kappas demonstrate that these models are above threshold for use in classrooms.

Building Robust Content Scoring Models for Student Explanations of Social Justice Science Issues

This research is situated in the space between an existing NLP capability and its use(s) in an educational context. We analyze oral reading data collected with a deployed automated speech analysis software and consider how the results of automated speech analysis can be interpreted and used to inform the ideation and design of a new feature -- feedback to learners and teachers. Our analysis shows how the details of the system's performance and the details of the context of use both significantly impact the ideation process.

From Miscue to Evidence of Difficulty: Analysis of Automatically Detected Miscues in Oral Reading for Feedback Potential

Lexical simplification (LS) is a process of replacing complex words with simpler alternatives to help readers understand sentences seamlessly. This process is divided into two primary subtasks: assessing word complexities and replacing high-complexity words with simpler alternatives. Employing task-specific supervised data to train models is a prevalent strategy for addressing these subtasks. However, such approach cannot be employed for low-resource languages. Therefore, this paper introduces a multilingual LS pipeline system that does not rely on supervised data. Specifically, we have developed systems based on GPT-4 for each subtask. Our systems demonstrated top-class performance on both tasks in many languages. The results indicate that GPT-4 can effectively assess lexical complexity and simplify complex words in a multilingual context with high quality.

TMU-HIT at MLSP 2024: How Well Can GPT-4 Tackle Multilingual Lexical Simplification?

Lexical simplification, the process of simplifying complex content in text without any modifications to the syntactical structure of text, plays a crucial role in enhancing comprehension and accessibility. This paper presents an approach to lexical simplification that relies on the capabilities of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) models to predict the complexity of words and substitute complex words with simpler alternatives. Early lexical simplification methods predominantly relied on rule-based approaches, transitioning gradually to machine learning and deep learning techniques, leveraging contextual embeddings from large language models. However, the the emergence of generative AI models revolutionized the landscape of natural language processing, including lexical simplification. In this study, we proposed a straightforward yet effective method that employs generative AI models for both predicting lexical complexity and generating appropriate substitutions. To predict lexical complexity, we adopted three distinct types of prompt templates, while for lexical substitution, we employed three prompt templates alongside an ensemble approach. Extending our experimentation to include both English and Sinhala data, our approach demonstrated comparable performance across both languages, with particular strengths in lexical substitution.

ANU at MLSP-2024: Prompt-based Lexical Simplification for English and Sinhala

Lexical substitute generation is a task where we generate substitutes for a given word to fit in the required context. It is one of the main steps for automatic lexical simplifcation. In this paper, we introduce an automatic lexical simplification system using the GPT-3 large language model. The system generates simplified candidate substitutions for complex words to aid readability and comprehension for the reader. The paper describes the system that we submitted for the Multilingual Lexical Simplification Pipeline Shared Task at the 2024 BEA Workshop. During the shared task, we experimented with Catalan, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and German for the Lexical Simplification Shared Task. We achieved the best results in Catalan and Portuguese, and were runners-up in English, French and Italian. To further research in this domain, we also release our code upon acceptance of the paper.

ISEP_Presidency_University at MLSP 2024 Shared Task: Using GPT-3.5 to Generate Substitutes for Lexical Simplification

We present the submissions of team Archaeology for the Lexical Simplification and Lexical Complexity Prediction Shared Tasks at BEA2024. Our approach for this shared task consists in creating two pipelines for generating lexical substitutions and estimating the complexity: one using machine translation texts into English and one using the original language.
For the LCP subtask, our xgb regressor is trained with engineered features (based primarily on English language resources) and shallow word structure features. For the LS subtask we use a locally-executed quantized LLM to generate candidates and sort them by complexity score computed using the pipeline designed for LCP.
These pipelines provide distinct perspectives on the lexical simplification process, offering insights into the efficacy and limitations of employing Machine Translation versus direct processing on the original language data.

Machine Translation for Lexical Complexity Prediction and Lexical Simplification

In this paper we present the participation of the RETUYT-INCO team at the BEA-MLSP 2024 shared task. 
We followed different approaches, from Multilayer Perceptron models with word embeddings to Large Language Models fine-tuned on different datasets: already existing, crowd-annotated, and synthetic.
Our best models are based on fine-tuning Mistral-7B, either with a manually annotated dataset or with synthetic data.

RETUYT-INCO at MLSP 2024: Experiments on Language Simplification using Embeddings, Classifiers and Large Language Models

This paper presents GMU's submission to the Multilingual Lexical Simplification Pipeline (MLSP) shared task at the BEA workshop 2024. The task includes Lexical Complexity Prediction (LCP) and Lexical Simplification (LS) sub-tasks across 10 languages. Our submissions achieved rankings ranging from 1st to 5th in LCP and from 1st to 3rd in LS. Our best performing approach for LCP is a weighted ensemble based on Pearson correlation of language specific transformer models trained on all languages combined. For LS, GPT4-turbo zero-shot prompting achieved the best performance.

GMU at MLSP 2024: Multilingual Lexical Simplification with Transformer Models

This paper presents the results of our team's participation in the BEA 2024 shared task on the multilingual lexical simplification pipeline (MLSP; Shardlow et al., 2024). During the task, organizers supplied data that combined two components of the simplification pipeline: lexical complexity prediction and lexical substitution. This dataset encompassed ten languages, including French. Given the absence of dedicated training data, teams were challenged with employing systems trained on pre-existing resources and evaluating their performance on unexplored test data.

Our team contributed to the task using previously developed models for predicting lexical difficulty in French (Tack, 2021). These models were built on deep learning architectures, adding to our participation in the CWI 2018 shared task (De Hertog and Tack, 2018). The training dataset comprised 262,054 binary decision annotations, capturing perceived lexical difficulty, collected from a sample of 56 non-native French readers. Two pre-trained neural logistic models were used: (1) a model for predicting difficulty for words within their sentence context, and (2) a model for predicting difficulty for isolated words.

The findings revealed that despite being trained for a distinct prediction task (as indicated by a negative R2 fit), transferring the logistic predictions of lexical difficulty to continuous scores of lexical complexity exhibited a positive correlation. Specifically, the results indicated that isolated predictions exhibited a higher correlation (r = .36) compared to contextualized predictions (r = .33). Moreover, isolated predictions demonstrated a remarkably higher Spearman rank correlation (ρ = .50) than contextualized predictions (ρ = .35). These results align with earlier observations by Tack (2021), suggesting that the ground truth primarily captures more lexical access difficulties than word-to-context integration problems.

ITEC at MLSP 2024: Transferring Predictions of Lexical Difficulty from Non-Native Readers

In this paper, we present an approach for solving SemEval-2024 Task 3: The Competition of Multimodal Emotion Cause Analysis in Conversations. The task includes two subtasks that focus on emotion-cause pair extraction using text, video, and audio modalities. Our approach is composed of encoding all modalities (MFCC and Wav2Vec for audio, 3D-CNN for video, and transformer-based models for text) and combining them in an utterance-level fusion module. The model is then optimized for link and emotion prediction simultaneously. Our approach achieved 6th place in both subtasks. The full leaderboard can be found at \url{https://codalab.lisn.upsaclay.fr/competitions/16141#results}.

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Building Robust Content Scoring Models for Student Explanations of Social Justice Science Issues

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