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Speech-comprehension difficulties are common among older people. Standard speech tests do not fully capture such difficulties because the tests poorly resemble the context-rich, story-like nature of ongoing conversation and are typically…

We present a computational analysis of cognate effects on the spontaneous linguistic productions of advanced non-native speakers. Introducing a large corpus of highly competent non-native English speakers, and using a set of carefully…

Readability assessment aims to evaluate the reading difficulty of a text. In recent years, while deep learning technology has been gradually applied to readability assessment, most approaches fail to consider either the length of the text…

A large portion of texts is written in English, but readers who see English as a Foreign Language (EFL) often struggle to read texts accurately and swiftly. EFL readers seek help from professional teachers and mentors, which is limited and…

While state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on many tasks, there has been extensive research on undesirable model behavior such as hallucinations and bias. In this work, we investigate how the…

The writing examples of English language learners may be different from those of native speakers. Given that there is a significant differences in second language (L2) learners' error types by their proficiency levels, this paper attempts…

Automatic readability assessment plays a key role in ensuring effective and accessible written communication. Despite significant progress, the field is hindered by inconsistent definitions of readability and measurements that rely on…

Reading comprehension, a fundamental cognitive ability essential for knowledge acquisition, is a complex skill, with a notable number of learners lacking proficiency in this domain. This study introduces innovative tasks for Brain-Computer…

Evaluating the grammatical competence of second language (L2) learners is essential both for providing targeted feedback and for assessing proficiency. To achieve this, we propose a novel framework leveraging the English Grammar Profile…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are predominantly evaluated on Standard American English (SAE), often overlooking the diversity of global English varieties. This narrow focus may raise fairness concerns as degraded performance on non-standard…

Estimating the cognitive complexity of reading comprehension (RC) items is crucial for assessing item difficulty before it is administered to learners. Unlike syntactic and semantic features, such as passage length or semantic similarity…

Recent studies suggest that very small language models (SLMs) can generate surprisingly coherent text when trained on simplified, child-directed corpora such as TinyStories. These findings have been interpreted as evidence that readability…

Easy Read text is one of the main forms of access to information for people with reading difficulties. One of the key characteristics of this type of text is the requirement to split sentences into smaller grammatical segments, to…

Lexical Semantic Change (LSC) is the phenomenon in which the meaning of a word change over time. Most studies on LSC focus on improving the performance of estimating the degree of LSC, however, it is often difficult to interpret how the…

Estimating item difficulty through field-testing is often resource-intensive and time-consuming. As such, there is strong motivation to develop methods that can predict item difficulty at scale using only the item content. Large Language…

Reading comprehension is a key for individual success, yet the assessment of question difficulty remains challenging due to the extensive human annotation and large-scale testing required by traditional methods such as linguistic analysis…

Text readability assessment has a wide range of applications for different target people, from language learners to people with disabilities. The fast pace of textual content production on the web makes it impossible to measure text…

Language students are most engaged while reading texts at an appropriate difficulty level. However, existing methods of evaluating text difficulty focus mainly on vocabulary and do not prioritize grammatical features, hence they do not work…

Native speakers can judge whether a sentence is an acceptable instance of their language. Acceptability provides a means of evaluating whether computational language models are processing language in a human-like manner. We test the ability…

Multilingual Machine Translation promises to improve translation quality between non-English languages. This is advantageous for several reasons, namely lower latency (no need to translate twice), and reduced error cascades (e.g., avoiding…