ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Complementary Systems for Off-Topic Spoken Response Detection (2020)

Increased demand to learn English for business and education has led to growing interest in automatic spoken language assessment and teaching systems. With this shift to automated approaches it is important that systems reliably assess all aspects of a candidate`s responses. This paper examines one form of spoken language assessment; whether the response from the candidate is relevant to the prompt provided. This will be referred to as off-topic spoken response detection. Two forms of previously proposed approaches are examined in this work: the hierarchical attention-based topic model (HATM); and the similarity grid model (SGM). The work focuses on the scenario when the prompt, and associated responses, have not been seen in the training data, enabling the system to be applied to new test scripts without the need to collect data or retrain the model. To improve the performance of the systems for unseen prompts, data augmentation based on easy data augmentation (EDA) and translation based approaches are applied. Additionally for the HATM, a form of prompt dropout is described. The systems were evaluated on both seen and unseen prompts from Linguaskill Business and General English tests. For unseen data the performance of the HATM was improved using data augmentation, in contrast to the SGM where no gains were obtained. The two approaches were found to be complementary to one another, yielding a combined F0.5 score of 0.814 for off-topic response detection where the prompts have not been seen in training.
CIMA: A Large Open Access Dialogue Dataset for Tutoring (2020)

One-to-one tutoring is often an effective means to help students learn, and recent experiments with neural conversation systems are promising. However, large open datasets of tutoring conversations are lacking. To remedy this, we propose a novel asynchronous method for collecting tutoring dialogue via crowdworkers that is both amenable to the needs of deep learning algorithms and reflective of pedagogical concerns. In this approach, extended conversations are obtained between crowdworkers role-playing as both students and tutors. The CIMA collection, which we make publicly available, is novel in that students are exposed to overlapping grounded concepts between exercises and multiple relevant tutoring responses are collected for the same input. CIMA contains several compelling properties from an educational perspective: student role-players complete exercises in fewer turns during the course of the conversation and tutor players adopt strategies that conform with some educational conversational norms, such as providing hints versus asking questions in appropriate contexts. The dataset enables a model to be trained to generate the next tutoring utterance in a conversation, conditioned on a provided action strategy.
Becoming Linguistically Mature: Modeling English and German Children`s Writing Development Across School Grades (2020)

In this paper we employ a novel approach to advancing our understanding of the development of writing in English and German children across school grades using classification tasks. The data used come from two recently compiled corpora: The English data come from the the GiC corpus (983 school children in second-, sixth-, ninth- and eleventh-grade) and the German data are from the FD-LEX corpus (930 school children in fifth- and ninth-grade). The key to this paper is the combined use of what we refer to as {\textquoteleft}complexity contours', i.e. series of measurements that capture the progression of linguistic complexity within a text, and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) classifiers that adequately capture the sequential information in those contours. Our experiments demonstrate that RNN classifiers trained on complexity contours achieve higher classification accuracy than one trained on text-average complexity scores. In a second step, we determine the relative importance of the features from four distinct categories through a Sensitivity-Based Pruning approach.
Annotation and Classification of Evidence and Reasoning Revisions in Argumentative Writing (2020)

Automated writing evaluation systems can improve students' writing insofar as students attend to the feedback provided and revise their essay drafts in ways aligned with such feedback. Existing research on revision of argumentative writing in such systems, however, has focused on the types of revisions students make (e.g., surface vs. content) rather than the extent to which revisions actually respond to the feedback provided and improve the essay. We introduce an annotation scheme to capture the nature of sentence-level revisions of evidence use and reasoning (the {\textquoteleft}RER' scheme) and apply it to 5th- and 6th-grade students' argumentative essays. We show that reliable manual annotation can be achieved and that revision annotations correlate with a holistic assessment of essay improvement in line with the feedback provided. Furthermore, we explore the feasibility of automatically classifying revisions according to our scheme.
Can Neural Networks Automatically Score Essay Traits? (2020)

Essay traits are attributes of an essay that can help explain how well written (or badly written) the essay is. Examples of traits include Content, Organization, Language, Sentence Fluency, Word Choice, etc. A lot of research in the last decade has dealt with automatic holistic essay scoring - where a machine rates an essay and gives a score for the essay. However, writers need feedback, especially if they want to improve their writing - which is why trait-scoring is important. In this paper, we show how a deep-learning based system can outperform feature-based machine learning systems, as well as a string kernel system in scoring essay traits.
Tracking the Evolution of Written Language Competence in L2 Spanish Learners (2020)

In this paper we present an NLP-based approach for tracking the evolution of written language competence in L2 Spanish learners using a wide range of linguistic features automatically extracted from students' written productions. Beyond reporting classification results for different scenarios, we explore the connection between the most predictive features and the teaching curriculum, finding that our set of linguistic features often reflect the explicit instructions that students receive during each course.
Distractor Analysis and Selection for Multiple-Choice Cloze Questions for Second-Language Learners (2020)

We consider the problem of automatically suggesting distractors for multiple-choice cloze questions designed for second-language learners. We describe the creation of a dataset including collecting manual annotations for distractor selection. We assess the relationship between the choices of the annotators and features based on distractors and the correct answers, both with and without the surrounding passage context in the cloze questions. Simple features of the distractor and correct answer correlate with the annotations, though we find substantial benefit to additionally using large-scale pretrained models to measure the fit of the distractor in the context. Based on these analyses, we propose and train models to automatically select distractors, and measure the importance of model components quantitatively.
Assisting Undergraduate Students in Writing Spanish Methodology Sections (2020)

In undergraduate theses, a good methodology section should describe the series of steps that were followed in performing the research. To assist students in this task, we develop machine-learning models and an app that uses them to provide feedback while students write. We construct an annotated corpus that identifies sentences representing methodological steps and labels when a methodology contains a logical sequence of such steps. We train machine-learning models based on language modeling and lexical features that can identify sentences representing methodological steps with 0.939 f-measure, and identify methodology sections containing a logical sequence of steps with an accuracy of 87{\%}. We incorporate these models into a Microsoft Office Add-in, and show that students who improved their methodologies according to the model feedback received better grades on their methodologies.
Applications of Natural Language Processing in Bilingual Language Teaching: An Indonesian-English Case Study (2020)

Multilingual corpora are difficult to compile and a classroom setting adds pedagogy to the mix of factors which make this data so rich and problematic to classify. In this paper, we set out methodological considerations of using automated speech recognition to build a corpus of teacher speech in an Indonesian language classroom. Our preliminary results (64{\%} word error rate) suggest these tools have the potential to speed data collection in this context. We provide practical examples of our data structure, details of our piloted computer-assisted processes, and fine-grained error analysis. Our study is informed and directed by genuine research questions and discussion in both the education and computational linguistics fields. We highlight some of the benefits and risks of using these emerging technologies to analyze the complex work of language teachers and in education more generally.
An empirical investigation of neural methods for content scoring of science explanations (2020)

With the widespread adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), science teachers and online learning environments face the challenge of evaluating students' integration of different dimensions of science learning. Recent advances in representation learning in natural language processing have proven effective across many natural language processing tasks, but a rigorous evaluation of the relative merits of these methods for scoring complex constructed response formative assessments has not previously been carried out. We present a detailed empirical investigation of feature-based, recurrent neural network, and pre-trained transformer models on scoring content in real-world formative assessment data. We demonstrate that recent neural methods can rival or exceed the performance of feature-based methods. We also provide evidence that different classes of neural models take advantage of different learning cues, and pre-trained transformer models may be more robust to spurious, dataset-specific learning cues, better reflecting scoring rubrics.
An Exploratory Study of Argumentative Writing by Young Students: A transformer-based Approach (2020)

We present a computational exploration of argument critique writing by young students. Middle school students were asked to criticize an argument presented in the prompt, focusing on identifying and explaining the reasoning flaws. This task resembles an established college-level argument critique task. Lexical and discourse features that utilize detailed domain knowledge to identify critiques exist for the college task but do not perform well on the young students' data. Instead, transformer-based architecture (e.g., BERT) fine-tuned on a large corpus of critique essays from the college task performs much better (over 20{\%} improvement in F1 score). Analysis of the performance of various configurations of the system suggests that while children`s writing does not exhibit the standard discourse structure of an argumentative essay, it does share basic local sequential structures with the more mature writers.
Should You Fine-Tune BERT for Automated Essay Scoring? (2020)

Most natural language processing research now recommends large Transformer-based models with fine-tuning for supervised classification tasks; older strategies like bag-of-words features and linear models have fallen out of favor. Here we investigate whether, in automated essay scoring (AES) research, deep neural models are an appropriate technological choice. We find that fine-tuning BERT produces similar performance to classical models at significant additional cost. We argue that while state-of-the-art strategies do match existing best results, they come with opportunity costs in computational resources. We conclude with a review of promising areas for research on student essays where the unique characteristics of Transformers may provide benefits over classical methods to justify the costs.
GECToR -- Grammatical Error Correction: Tag, Not Rewrite (2020)

In this paper, we present a simple and efficient GEC sequence tagger using a Transformer encoder. Our system is pre-trained on synthetic data and then fine-tuned in two stages: first on errorful corpora, and second on a combination of errorful and error-free parallel corpora. We design custom token-level transformations to map input tokens to target corrections. Our best single-model/ensemble GEC tagger achieves an F{\_}0.5 of 65.3/66.5 on CONLL-2014 (test) and F{\_}0.5 of 72.4/73.6 on BEA-2019 (test). Its inference speed is up to 10 times as fast as a Transformer-based seq2seq GEC system.
Interpreting Neural CWI Classifiers' Weights as Vocabulary Size (2020)

Complex Word Identification (CWI) is a task for the identification of words that are challenging for second-language learners to read. Even though the use of neural classifiers is now common in CWI, the interpretation of their parameters remains difficult. This paper analyzes neural CWI classifiers and shows that some of their parameters can be interpreted as vocabulary size. We present a novel formalization of vocabulary size measurement methods that are practiced in the applied linguistics field as a kind of neural classifier. We also contribute to building a novel dataset for validating vocabulary testing and readability via crowdsourcing.
Automated Scoring of Clinical Expressive Language Evaluation Tasks (2020)

Many clinical assessment instruments used to diagnose language impairments in children include a task in which the subject must formulate a sentence to describe an image using a specific target word. Because producing sentences in this way requires the speaker to integrate syntactic and semantic knowledge in a complex manner, responses are typically evaluated on several different dimensions of appropriateness yielding a single composite score for each response. In this paper, we present a dataset consisting of non-clinically elicited responses for three related sentence formulation tasks, and we propose an approach for automatically evaluating their appropriateness. We use neural machine translation to generate correct-incorrect sentence pairs in order to create synthetic data to increase the amount and diversity of training data for our scoring model. Our scoring model uses transfer learning to facilitate automatic sentence appropriateness evaluation. We further compare custom word embeddings with pre-trained contextualized embeddings serving as features for our scoring model. We find that transfer learning improves scoring accuracy, particularly when using pretrained contextualized embeddings.
Context-based Automated Scoring of Complex Mathematical Responses (2020)

The tasks of automatically scoring either textual or algebraic responses to mathematical questions have both been well-studied, albeit separately. In this paper we propose a method for automatically scoring responses that contain both text and algebraic expressions. Our method not only achieves high agreement with human raters, but also links explicitly to the scoring rubric {--} essentially providing explainable models and a way to potentially provide feedback to students in the future.
Predicting the Difficulty and Response Time of Multiple Choice Questions Using Transfer Learning (2020)

This paper investigates whether transfer learning can improve the prediction of the difficulty and response time parameters for 18,000 multiple-choice questions from a high-stakes medical exam. The type the signal that best predicts difficulty and response time is also explored, both in terms of representation abstraction and item component used as input (e.g., whole item, answer options only, etc.). The results indicate that, for our sample, transfer learning can improve the prediction of item difficulty when response time is used as an auxiliary task but not the other way around. In addition, difficulty was best predicted using signal from the item stem (the description of the clinical case), while all parts of the item were important for predicting the response time.
A Comparative Study of Synthetic Data Generation Methods for Grammatical Error Correction (2020)

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) is concerned with correcting grammatical errors in written text. Current GEC systems, namely those leveraging statistical and neural machine translation, require large quantities of annotated training data, which can be expensive or impractical to obtain. This research compares techniques for generating synthetic data utilized by the two highest scoring submissions to the restricted and low-resource tracks in the BEA-2019 Shared Task on Grammatical Error Correction.
Dynamic Sentence Boundary Detection for Simultaneous Translation (2020)

Simultaneous Translation is a great challenge in which translation starts before the source sentence finished. Most studies take transcription as input and focus on balancing translation quality and latency for each sentence. However, most ASR systems can not provide accurate sentence boundaries in realtime. Thus it is a key problem to segment sentences for the word streaming before translation. In this paper, we propose a novel method for sentence boundary detection that takes it as a multi-class classification task under the end-to-end pre-training framework. Experiments show significant improvements both in terms of translation quality and latency.
End-to-End Speech Translation with Adversarial Training (2020)

End-to-End speech translation usually leverages audio-to-text parallel data to train an available speech translation model which has shown impressive results on various speech translation tasks. Due to the artificial cost of collecting audio-to-text parallel data, the speech translation is a natural low-resource translation scenario, which greatly hinders its improvement. In this paper, we proposed a new adversarial training method to leverage target monolingual data to relieve the low-resource shortcoming of speech translation. In our method, the existing speech translation model is considered as a Generator to gain a target language output, and another neural Discriminator is used to guide the distinction between outputs of speech translation model and true target monolingual sentences. Experimental results on the CCMT 2019-BSTC dataset speech translation task demonstrate that the proposed methods can significantly improve the performance of the End-to-End speech translation system.
Robust Neural Machine Translation with ASR Errors (2020)

In many practical applications, neural machine translation systems have to deal with the input from automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems which may contain a certain number of errors. This leads to two problems which degrade translation performance. One is the discrepancy between the training and testing data and the other is the translation error caused by the input errors may ruin the whole translation. In this paper, we propose a method to handle the two problems so as to generate robust translation to ASR errors. First, we simulate ASR errors in the training data so that the data distribution in the training and test is consistent. Second, we focus on ASR errors on homophone words and words with similar pronunciation and make use of their pronunciation information to help the translation model to recover from the input errors. Experiments on two Chinese-English data sets show that our method is more robust to input errors and can outperform the strong Transformer baseline significantly.
Improving Autoregressive NMT with Non-Autoregressive Model (2020)

Autoregressive neural machine translation (NMT) models are often used to teach non-autoregressive models via knowledge distillation. However, there are few studies on improving the quality of autoregressive translation (AT) using non-autoregressive translation (NAT). In this work, we propose a novel Encoder-NAD-AD framework for NMT, aiming at boosting AT with global information produced by NAT model. Specifically, under the semantic guidance of source-side context captured by the encoder, the non-autoregressive decoder (NAD) first learns to generate target-side hidden state sequence in parallel. Then the autoregressive decoder (AD) performs translation from left to right, conditioned on source-side and target-side hidden states. Since AD has global information generated by low-latency NAD, it is more likely to produce a better translation with less time delay. Experiments on WMT14 En-De, WMT16 En-Ro, and IWSLT14 De-En translation tasks demonstrate that our framework achieves significant improvements with only 8{\%} speed degeneration over the autoregressive NMT.
Modeling Discourse Structure for Document-level Neural Machine Translation (2020)

Recently, document-level neural machine translation (NMT) has become a hot topic in the community of machine translation. Despite its success, most of existing studies ignored the discourse structure information of the input document to be translated, which has shown effective in other tasks. In this paper, we propose to improve document-level NMT with the aid of discourse structure information. Our encoder is based on a hierarchical attention network (HAN) (Miculicich et al., 2018). Specifically, we first parse the input document to obtain its discourse structure. Then, we introduce a Transformer-based path encoder to embed the discourse structure information of each word. Finally, we combine the discourse structure information with the word embedding before it is fed into the encoder. Experimental results on the English-to-German dataset show that our model can significantly outperform both Transformer and Transformer+HAN.
BIT`s system for the AutoSimTrans 2020 (2020)

This paper describes our machine translation systems for the streaming Chinese-to-English translation task of AutoSimTrans 2020. We present a sentence length based method and a sentence boundary detection model based method for the streaming input segmentation. Experimental results of the transcription and the ASR output translation on the development data sets show that the translation system with the detection model based method outperforms the one with the length based method in BLEU score by 1.19 and 0.99 respectively under similar or better latency.
DebateSum: A large-scale argument mining and summarization dataset (2020)

Prior work in Argument Mining frequently alludes to its potential applications in automatic debating systems. Despite this focus, almost no datasets or models exist which apply natural language processing techniques to problems found within competitive formal debate. To remedy this, we present the DebateSum dataset. DebateSum consists of 187,386 unique pieces of evidence with corresponding argument and extractive summaries. DebateSum was made using data compiled by competitors within the National Speech and Debate Association over a 7year period. We train several transformer summarization models to benchmark summarization performance on DebateSum. We also introduce a set of fasttext word-vectors trained on DebateSum called debate2vec. Finally, we present a search engine for this dataset which is utilized extensively by members of the National Speech and Debate Association today. The DebateSum search engine is available to the public here: \url{http://www.debate.cards}