Austria

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate distractors for multiple-choice questions (MCQs), especially in domains like math education. However, existing approaches are limited in ensuring that the generated distractors are consistent with common student errors. We propose LookAlike, a method that improves error–distractor consistency via preference optimization. Our two main innovations are: (a)~mining synthetic preference pairs from model inconsistencies, and (b)~alternating supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to stabilize training. Unlike prior work that relies on heuristics or manually annotated preference data, LookAlike uses its own generation inconsistencies as dispreferred samples, thus enabling scalable and stable training. Evaluated on a real-world dataset of 1,400+ math MCQs, LookAlike achieves 51.6% accuracy in distractor generation and 57.2% in error generation under LLM-as-a-judge evaluation, outperforming an existing state-of-the-art method (45.6% / 47.7%). These improvements highlight the effectiveness of preference-based regularization and inconsistency mining for generating consistent math MCQ distractors at scale.

ACL 2025

LookAlike: Consistent Distractor Generation in Math MCQs

## 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. 
 
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Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
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NAACL 2024

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

workshop paper

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.* 
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Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Designing vocabulary learning activities for foreign/second language (L2) learners highly depends on the successful identification of difficult words. In this paper, we present a novel personalised word difficulty classifier for L2 Spanish, using the LexComSpaL2 corpus as training data and a BiLSTM model as the architecture. We train a base version (using the original LexComSpaL2 data) and a word family version of the classifier (adding word family knowledge as an extra feature). The base version obtains reasonably good performance (F1 = 0.53) and shows weak positive predictive power (ϕ = 0.32), underlining the potential of automated methods in determining vocabulary difficulty for individual L2 learners. The "word family classifier" is able to further push performance (F1 = 0.62 and ϕ = 0.45), highlighting the value of well-chosen linguistic features in developing word difficulty classifiers.

You Shall Know a Word's Difficulty by the Family It Keeps: Word Family Features in Personalised Word Difficulty Classifiers for L2 Spanish

Recent trends in NLP have shifted towards modeling lexical complexity as a continuous value, but practical implementations often remain binary. This opinion piece argues for the importance of truly graded lexical complexity prediction, particularly in language learning. We examine the evolution of lexical complexity modeling, highlighting the ``data bottleneck'' as a key obstacle. Overcoming this challenge can lead to significant benefits, such as enhanced personalization in language learning and improved text simplification. We call for a concerted effort from the research community to create high-quality, graded complexity datasets and to develop methods that fully leverage continuous complexity modeling, while addressing ethical considerations. By fully embracing the continuous nature of lexical complexity, we can develop more effective, inclusive, and personalized language technologies.

The Need for Truly Graded Lexical Complexity Prediction

This paper introduces IPPOLIS Write, an open source, web-based tool designed to provide automated feedback on the formal aspects of scientific documents. Aimed at addressing the variability in writing and language skills among scientists and the challenges faced by supervisors in providing consistent feedback on student theses, IPPOLIS Write integrates several open source tools and custom implementations to analyze documents for a range of formal issues, including grammatical errors, consistent introduction of acronyms, comparison of literature entries with several databases, referential integrity of figures and tables, and consistent link access dates.

IPPOLIS Write generates reports with statistical summaries and annotated documents that highlight specific issues and suggest improvements while also providing additional background information where appropriate. To evaluate its effectiveness, a qualitative assessment is conducted using a small but diverse dataset of bachelor's and master's theses sourced from arXiv. Our findings demonstrate the tool's potential to enhance the quality of scientific documents by providing targeted and consistent feedback, thereby aiding both students and professionals in refining their document preparation skills.

Towards Automatic Formal Feedback on Scientific Documents

The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) opens up the possibility of using them aspersonal tutors. This has led to the development of several intelligent tutoring systems and learning assistants that use LLMs as back-ends with various degrees of engineering. In this study, we seek to compare human tutors with LLM tutorsin terms of engagement, empathy, scaffolding, and conciseness. We ask human tutors to compare the performance of an LLM tutor with that of a human tutor in teaching grade-school math word problems on these qualities. We find that annotators with teaching experience perceive LLMs as showing higher performance than human tutors in all 4 metrics. The biggest advantage is in empathy, where 80% of our annotators prefer the LLM tutor more often than the human tutors. Our study paints a positive picture of LLMs as tutors and indicates that these models can be used to reduce the load on human teachers in the future.

Educators' Perceptions of Large Language Models as Tutors: Comparing Human and AI Tutors in a Blind Text-only Setting

Real-word spelling errors (RWSEs) pose special challenges for detection methods, as they ‘hide' in the form of another existing word and in many cases even fit in syntactically. We present a modern Transformer-based implementation of earlier probabilistic methods based on confusion sets and show that RWSEs can be detected with a good balance between missing errors and raising too many false
alarms. The confusion sets are dynamically configurable, allowing teachers to easily adjust which errors trigger feedback.

Transformer-Based Real-Word Spelling Error Feedback with Configurable Confusion Sets

Weakly supervised learning (WSL) is a machine learning approach used when labeled data is scarce or expensive to obtain. In such scenarios, models are trained using weaker supervision sources instead of human-annotated data. However, these sources are often noisy and may introduce unquantified biases during training. This issue is particularly pronounced in automated scoring (AS) of second language (L2) learner output, where high variability and limited generalizability pose significant challenges.
In this paper, we investigate analytical scoring of L2 learner responses under weak and semi-supervised learning conditions, leveraging Prediction-Powered Inference (PPI) to provide statistical guarantees on score validity. We compare two approaches: (1) synthetic scoring using large language models (LLMs), and (2) a semi-supervised setting in which a machine learning model, trained on a small gold-standard set, generates predictions for a larger unlabeled corpus. In both cases, PPI is applied to construct valid confidence intervals for assessing the reliability of the predicted scores.
Our analysis, based on a dataset of L2 learner conversations with an AI agent, shows that PPI is highly informative for evaluating the quality of weakly annotated data. Moreover, we demonstrate that PPI can increase the effective sample size by over 150% relative to the original human-scored subset, enabling more robust inference in educational assessment settings where labeled data is scarce.

Automated L2 Proficiency Scoring: Weak Supervision, Large Language Models, and Statistical Guarantees

Inference making is an essential but complex skill in reading comprehension (RC). Some inferences require resolving references across sentences, and some rely on using prior knowledge to fill in the detail that is not explicitly written in the text. Diagnostic RC questions can help educators provide more effective and targeted reading instruction and interventions for school-age students. We introduce a taxonomy of inference types for RC and use it to analyze the distribution of items within a diagnostic RC item bank. Next, we present experiments using GPT-4o to generate bridging-inference RC items for given reading passages via few-shot prompting, comparing conditions with and without chain-of-thought prompts. Generated items were evaluated on three aspects: overall item quality, appropriate inference type, and LLM reasoning, achieving high inter-rater agreements above 0.90. Our results show that GPT-4o produced 93.8% good-quality questions suitable for operational use in grade 3-12 contexts; however, only 42.6% of the generated questions accurately matched the targeted inference type. We conclude that combining automatic item generation with human judgment offers a promising path toward scalable, high-quality diagnostic RC assessments.

Automatic Generation of Inference Making Questions for Reading Comprehension Assessments

We present LangEye, a mobile application for contextual vocabulary learning that combines learner-curated content with generative NLP. Learners use their smartphone camera to capture real-world objects and create personalized "memories" enriched with definitions, example sentences, and pronunciations generated via object recognition, large language models, and machine translation. LangEye features a three-phase review system — progressing from picture recognition to sentence completion and free recall. In a one-week exploratory study with 20 French (L2) learners, the learner-curated group reported higher engagement and motivation than those using pre-curated materials. Participants valued the app's personalization and contextual relevance. This study highlights the potential of integrating generative NLP with situated, learner-driven interaction. We identify design opportunities for adaptive review difficulty, improved content generation, and better support for language-specific features. LangEye points toward scalable, personalized vocabulary learning grounded in real-world contexts.

LangEye: Toward 'Anytime' Learner-Driven Vocabulary Learning From Real-World Objects

We train a relative sentence readability estimator from a corpus without absolute sentence readability.
Since sentence readability depends on the reader's knowledge, objective and absolute readability assessments require costly annotation by experts.
Therefore, few corpora have absolute sentence readability, while parallel corpora for text simplification with relative sentence readability between two sentences are available for many languages.
With multilingual applications in mind, we propose a method to estimate relative sentence readability based on parallel corpora for text simplification.
Experimental results on ranking a set of English sentences by readability show that our method outperforms existing unsupervised methods and is comparable to supervised methods based on absolute sentence readability.

Unsupervised Sentence Readability Estimation Based on Parallel Corpora for Text Simplification

This study presents a teacher-centered evaluation of an AI-powered reading comprehension tool, developed to support learners with language-based difficulties. Drawing on the Social Acceptance of Technology (SAT) framework, we investigate not only technical usability but also the pedagogical, ethical, and contextual dimensions of AI integration in classrooms. We explore how teachers perceive the platform's alignment with inclusive pedagogies, instructional workflows, and professional values through a mixed-methods approach, including questionnaires and focus groups with educators. Findings a shift from initial curiosity to critical, practice-informed reflection, with trust, transparency, and adaptability emerging as central concerns. The study contributes a replicable evaluation framework and highlights the importance of engaging teachers as co-designers in the development of educational technologies.

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You Shall Know a Word's Difficulty by the Family It Keeps: Word Family Features in Personalised Word Difficulty Classifiers for L2 Spanish

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Exploring Automated Distractor Generation for Math Multiple-choice Questions via Large Language Models

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Next from ACL 2025

You Shall Know a Word's Difficulty by the Family It Keeps: Word Family Features in Personalised Word Difficulty Classifiers for L2 Spanish

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Exploring Automated Distractor Generation for Math Multiple-choice Questions via Large Language Models

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

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