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The goal of this work is to build a classifier that can identify text complexity within the context of teaching reading to English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. To present language learners with texts that are suitable to their level…
This paper addresses the task of readability assessment for the texts aimed at second language (L2) learners. One of the major challenges in this task is the lack of significantly sized level-annotated data. For the present work, we…
Linguists and psychologists have long been studying cross-linguistic transfer, the influence of native language properties on linguistic performance in a foreign language. In this work we provide empirical evidence for this process in the…
Methods for scoring text readability have been studied for over a century, and are widely used in research and in user-facing applications in many domains. Thus far, the development and evaluation of such methods have primarily relied on…
Corpora and web texts can become a rich language learning resource if we have a means of assessing whether they are linguistically appropriate for learners at a given proficiency level. In this paper, we aim at addressing this issue by…
This paper presents the first attempt, up to our knowledge, to classify English writing styles on this scale with the challenge of classifying day to day language written by writers with different backgrounds covering various areas of…
Text simplification is crucial for improving accessibility and comprehension for English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. This study goes a step further and aims to facilitate ESL learners' language acquisition by simplification.…
The meteoric rise in text generation capability has been accompanied by parallel growth in interest in machine-generated text detection: the capability to identify whether a given text was generated using a model or written by a person.…
This work examines the impact of cross-linguistic transfer on grammatical errors in English as Second Language (ESL) texts. Using a computational framework that formalizes the theory of Contrastive Analysis (CA), we demonstrate that…
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at providing information acquired during pretraining on large-scale corpora and following instructions through user prompts. This study investigates whether the quality of LLM responses varies depending on…
English as a Second Language (ESL) learners often encounter unknown words that hinder their text comprehension. Automatically detecting these words as users read can enable computing systems to provide just-in-time definitions, synonyms, or…
Reading comprehension, which has been defined as gaining an understanding of written text through a process of translating grapheme into meaning, is an important academic skill. Other language learning skills - writing, speaking and…
Readability assessment aims to automatically classify text by the level appropriate for learning readers. Traditional approaches to this task utilize a variety of linguistically motivated features paired with simple machine learning models.…
Large language models (LLMs) are used globally, and because much of their training data is in English, they typically perform best on English inputs. As a result, many non-native English speakers interact with them in English as a second…
We present an evaluation framework for interactive dialogue assessment in the context of English as a Second Language (ESL) speakers. Our framework collects dialogue-level interactivity labels (e.g., topic management; 4 labels in total) and…
Language difference is one of the factors that hinder the acquisition of second language skills. In this article, we introduce a novel solution that leverages the strength of deep neural networks to measure the semantic dissimilarity…
This paper analyses the contribution of language metrics and, potentially, of linguistic structures, to classify French learners of English according to levels of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFRL). The purpose…
The ability to automatically determine the age audience of a novel provides many opportunities for the development of information retrieval tools. Firstly, developers of book recommendation systems and electronic libraries may be interested…
The problem of accurately predicting relative reading difficulty across a set of sentences arises in a number of important natural language applications, such as finding and curating effective usage examples for intelligent language…
What makes a word difficult to learn, and how does the difficulty depend on the learner's native language? We computationally model vocabulary difficulty for English learners whose first language is Spanish, German, or Chinese with…