Related papers: Towards interpretable models for language proficie…

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…

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 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…

Assessing language proficiency is essential for education, as it enables instruction tailored to learners needs. This paper investigates the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for automatically classifying German texts according to the…

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…

The availability of LLM benchmarks for the Estonian language is limited, and a comprehensive evaluation comparing the performance of different LLMs on Estonian tasks has yet to be conducted. We introduce a new benchmark for evaluating LLMs…

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 trained on English-centric data, resulting in uneven performance for smaller languages. We study whether continued pretraining (CPT) can substantially improve Estonian capabilities in a…

Large language models (LLMs) enable rapid and consistent automated evaluation of open-ended exam responses, including dimensions of content and argumentation that have traditionally required human judgment. This is particularly important in…

This study investigates lexical processing in Estonian. A large-scale single-subject experiment is reported that combines the word naming task with eye-tracking. Five response variables (first fixation duration, total fixation duration,…

Native language identification (NLI) is the task of training (via supervised machine learning) a classifier that guesses the native language of the author of a text. This task has been extensively researched in the last decade, and the…

This paper presents EstBERT, a large pretrained transformer-based language-specific BERT model for Estonian. Recent work has evaluated multilingual BERT models on Estonian tasks and found them to outperform the baselines. Still, based on…

Level assessment for foreign language students is necessary for putting them in the right level group, furthermore, interviewing students is a very time-consuming task, so we propose to automate the evaluation of speaker fluency level by…

In recent years, the number of people studying English as a second language (ESL) has surpassed the number of native speakers. Recent work have demonstrated the success of providing personalized content based on reading difficulty, such as…

As NLP tools become ubiquitous in today's technological landscape, they are increasingly applied to languages with a variety of typological structures. However, NLP research does not focus primarily on typological differences in its…

Although WordNet is a valuable resource because of its structured semantic networks and extensive vocabulary, its fine-grained sense distinctions can be challenging for second-language learners. To address this issue, we developed a version…

English proficiency assessments have become a necessary metric for filtering and selecting prospective candidates for both academia and industry. With the rise in demand for such assessments, it has become increasingly necessary to have the…

The Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) guidelines describe language proficiency of learners on a scale of 6 levels. While the description of CEFR guidelines is generic across languages, the development of automated proficiency…

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.…

Assessing instruction quality is a fundamental component of any improvement efforts in the education system. However, traditional manual assessments are expensive, subjective, and heavily dependent on observers' expertise and idiosyncratic…