Austria

Vocabulary use is a fundamental aspect of second language (L2) proficiency. To date, its assessment by automated systems has typically examined the context-independent, or part-of-speech (PoS) related use of words. This paper introduces a novel approach to enable fine-grained vocabulary evaluation exploiting the precise use of words within a sentence. The scheme combines large language models (LLMs) with the English Vocabulary Profile (EVP). The EVP is a standard lexical resource that enables in-context vocabulary use to be linked with proficiency level. We evaluate the ability of LLMs to assign proficiency levels to individual words as they appear in L2 learner writing, addressing key challenges such as polysemy, contextual variation, and multi-word expressions. We compare LLMs to a PoS-based baseline. LLMs appear to exploit additional semantic information that yields improved performance.
We also explore correlations between word-level proficiency and essay-level proficiency. Finally, the approach is applied to examine the consistency of the EVP proficiency levels. Results show that LLMs are well-suited for the task of vocabulary assessment.

ACL 2025

Exploiting the English Vocabulary Profile for L2 word-level vocabulary assessment with LLMs

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)

Question Generation (QG), the task of automatically generating questions from a source input, has seen significant progress in recent years. Difficulty-controllable QG (DCQG) enables control over the difficulty level of generated questions while considering the learner's ability. Additionally, narrative-controllable QG (NCQG) allows control over the narrative aspects embedded in the questions. However, research in QG lacks a focus on combining these two types of control, which is important for generating questions tailored to educational purposes. To address this gap, we propose a strategy for Joint Narrative and Difficulty Control, enabling simultaneous control over these two attributes in the generation of reading comprehension questions. Our evaluation provides preliminary evidence that this approach is feasible, though it is not effective across all instances. Our findings highlight the conditions under which the strategy performs well and discuss the trade-offs associated with its application.

Advancing Question Generation with Joint Narrative and Difficulty Control

Advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked growing interest in their potential as explainable text evaluators. While LLMs have shown promise in assessing machine-generated texts in tasks such as summarization and machine translation, their effectiveness in evaluating human-written content—such as student writing in classroom settings—remains underexplored. In this paper, we investigate LLM-based specificity assessment of student reflections written in response to prompts, using three instruction-tuned models. Our findings indicate that although LLMs may underperform compared to simpler supervised baselines in terms of scoring accuracy, they offer a valuable interpretability advantage. Specifically, LLMs can generate user-friendly explanations that enhance the transparency and usability of automated specificity scoring systems.

Lessons Learned in Assessing Student Reflections with LLMs

Identifying instances of first language (L1) transfer -- the application of the linguistics structures of a speaker's first language to their second language(s) -- can facilitate second language (L2) learning as it can inform learning and teaching resources, especially when instances of negative transfer (that is, interference) can be identified. While studies of transfer between two languages A and B require a priori linguistic structures to be analyzed with three datasets (data from L1 speakers of language A, L1 speakers of language B, and L2 speakers of A or B), native language identification (NLI) -- a machine learning task to predict one's L1 based on one's L2 production -- has the advantage to detect instances of subtle and unpredicted transfer, casting a "wide net" to capture patterns of transfer that were missed before (Jarvis and Crossley, 2018). This study aims to apply NLI tasks to find potential instances of transfer of collocations. Our results, compared to previous transfer studies, indicate that NLI can be used to reveal collocation transfer, also in understudied L2 languages.

Using NLI to Identify Potential Collocation Transfer in L2 English

Across cultures, names tell a lot about their bearers as they carry deep personal, historical, and cultural significance. Names have also been found to serve as powerful signals of gender, race, and status in the social hierarchy--a pecking order in which individual positions shape others' expectations on their perceived competence and worth (Podolny, 2005). With the widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) in education and given that names are often an input for LLMs, it is crucial to evaluate whether LLMs may sort students into status positions based on first and last names and, if so, whether it is in an unfair, biased fashion. While prior work has primarily investigated biases in first names, little attention has been paid to last names and even less to the combined effects of first and last names. In this study, we conduct a large-scale analysis with bootstrap standard errors of 45,000 name variations across 5 ethnicities to examine how AI-generated responses exhibit systemic name biases. Our study investigates three key characteristics of inequality and finds that LLMs reflect, construct, and reinforce status hierarchies based on names that signal gender and ethnicity as they encode differential expectations of competence, leadership, and economic potential. Contrary to the common assumption that AI tends to favor Whites, we show that East and, in some contexts, South Asian names receive higher rankings. We also disaggregate Asians, a population projected to be the largest immigrant group in the U.S. by 2055. Our results challenge the monolithic Asian model minority assumption, illustrating a more complex and stratified model of bias. Additionally, spanning cultural categories by adopting Western first names improves AI-perceived status for East and Southeast Asian students, particularly for girls. Our findings underscore the importance of intersectional and more nuanced understandings of race, gender, and mixed identities in the evaluation of LLMs, rather than relying on broad, monolithic, and mutually exclusive categories. By examining LLM bias and discrimination in our multicultural contexts, our study illustrates potential harms of using LLMs in education as they do not merely reflect implicit biases but also actively construct new social hierarchies that can unfairly shape long-term life trajectories. An LLM that systematically assigns lower grades or subtly less favorable evaluations to students with certain name signals reinforces a tiered system of privilege and opportunity. Some groups may face structural disadvantages, while others encounter undue pressure from inflated expectations.

Name of Thrones: How Do LLMs Rank Student Names in Status Hierarchies Based on Race and Gender?

This study investigates the use of ChatGPT for Automated Essay Scoring (AES) in assessing Italian middle school students' written texts. Using rubrics targeting grammar, coherence and argumentation, we compare AI-generated feedback with that of a human teacher on a newly collected corpus of students' essays. Despite some differences, ChatGPT provided detailed and timely feedback that complements the teacher's role. These findings underscore the potential of generative AI to improve the assessment of writing, providing useful insights for educators and supporting students in developing their writing skills.

Exploring LLM-Based Assessment of Italian Middle School Writing: A Pilot Study

Engaging students in a coherent classroom discussion is one aspect of high-quality instruction and is an important skill that requires practice to acquire. With the goal of providing teachers with formative feedback on their classroom discussions, we investigate automated means for evaluating teachers' ability to lead coherent discussions in simulated classrooms. While prior work has shown the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) in assessing the coherence of relatively short texts, it has also found that LLMs struggle when assessing instructional quality. We evaluate the generalizability of task formulation strategies for assessing the coherence of classroom discussions across different subject domains using GPT-4o and discuss how these formulations address the previously reported challenges---the overestimation of instructional quality and the inability to extract relevant parts of discussions. Finally, we report lack of generalizability across domains and the misalignment with humans in the use of evidence from discussions as remaining challenges.

Exploring task formulation strategies to evaluate the coherence of classroom discussions with GPT-4o

Understanding how linguistic topics relate to one another is essential for designing effective and adaptive second-language (L2) instruction. In this work, we present a data-driven framework to model topic dependencies and difficulty within a Russian L2 learning curriculum. First, we estimate topic difficulty and student ability using a three-parameter Item Response Theory (IRT) model. Second, we construct topic-level knowledge graphs—represented as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs)—to capture prerequisite relations among topics, comparing a threshold-based method with the statistical Grow-Shrink Markov Blanket algorithm. Third, we evaluate the alignment between IRT-inferred topic difficulty and the structure of the graphs using both edge-level and global ordering metrics. Finally, we compare IRT-based estimates of student ability with teacher-provided assessments to validate the model's effectiveness in capturing learner proficiency. Our results show a promising agreement between the inferred graphs, IRT estimates, and human assessments, highlighting the framework's potential to support personalized learning and adaptive curriculum design in intelligent tutoring systems.

A Bayesian Approach to Inferring Prerequisite Structures and Topic Difficulty in Language Learning

Recent advancements in natural language processing, particularly large language models (LLMs), are making the automated evaluation of classroom discussions more achievable. In this work, we propose a method to improve the performance of LLMs on classroom discussion quality assessment by utilizing in-context learning (ICL) example retrieval. Specifically, we leverage example re-ranking and label ratio regulation, which forces a specific ratio of different types of examples on the ICL examples.
While a standard ICL example retrieval approach shows inferior performance compared to using a predetermined set of examples, our approach improves performance in all tested dimensions. We also conducted experiments to examine the ineffectiveness of the generic ICL example retrieval approach and found that the lack of positive and hard negative examples can be a potential cause. Our analyses emphasize the importance of maintaining a balanced distribution of classes (positive, non-hard negative, and hard negative examples) in creating a good set of ICL examples, especially when we can utilize educational knowledge to identify instances of hard negative examples.

Improving In-context Learning Example Retrieval for Classroom Discussion Assessment with Re-ranking and Label Ratio Regulation

Tutoring dialogues have gained significant attention in recent years, given the prominence of online learning and the emerging tutoring abilities of artificial intelligence (AI) agents powered by large language models (LLMs). Recent studies have shown that the strategies used by tutors can have significant effects on student outcomes, necessitating methods to predict how tutors will behave and how their actions impact students. However, few works have studied predicting tutor strategy in dialogues. Therefore, in this work we investigate the ability of modern LLMs, particularly Llama 3 and GPT-4o, to predict both future tutor moves and student outcomes in dialogues, using two math tutoring dialogue datasets. We find that even state-of-the-art LLMs struggle to predict future tutor strategy while tutor strategy is highly indicative of student outcomes, outlining a need for more powerful methods to approach this task.

Exploring LLMs for Predicting Tutor Strategy and Student Outcomes in Dialogues

This paper presents a data-driven analysis of Romanian secondary school textbooks through the lens of Bloom's Taxonomy, focusing on the promotion of critical thinking in instructional design. Using the ROTEX corpus, we extract and annotate almost 2 million words of Romanian Language and Literature textbooks (grades 5-8) with Bloom-aligned labels for verbs associated with pedagogical tasks. Our annotation pipeline combines automatic verb extraction, human filtering based on syntactic form and task relevance, and manual assignment of Bloom labels supported by in-text concordance checks. The resulting dataset enables fine-grained analysis of task complexity both across and within textbooks and grade levels. Our findings reveal a general lack of structured cognitive progression across most textbook series. We also propose a multi-dimensional framework combining cognitive-level and linguistic evaluation to assess instructional design quality. This work contributes annotated resources and reproducible methods for NLP-based educational content analysis in low-resource languages.

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