Austria

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&#39; 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.

ACL 2025

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

## 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.
 
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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

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.

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)

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.

Assessing Critical Thinking Components in Romanian Secondary School Textbooks: A Data Mining Approach to the ROTEX Corpus

This paper presents a strategy for improving AI assistants embedded in short e-learning courses. The proposed method is implemented within a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture and evaluated using several retrieval variants. The results show that query quality improves when the knowledge base is enriched with definitions of key concepts discussed in the course. Our main contribution is a lightweight enhancement approach that increases response quality without overloading the course with additional instructional content.

Improving AI assistants embedded in short e-learning courses with limited textual content

This paper presents an LLM-powered approach for generating concept maps to enhance digital reading comprehension in higher education. While particularly focused on supporting neurodivergent students with their distinct information processing patterns, this approach benefits all learners facing the cognitive challenges of digital text. We use GPT-4o-mini to extract concepts and relationships from educational texts across ten diverse disciplines using open-domain prompts without predefined categories or relation types, enabling discipline-agnostic extraction. Section-level processing achieved higher precision (83.62%) in concept extraction, while paragraph-level processing demonstrated superior recall (74.51%) in identifying educationally relevant concepts. We implemented an interactive web-based visualization tool https://simplified-cognitext.streamlit.app that transforms extracted concepts into navigable concept maps. User evaluation (n=14) showed that participants experienced a 31.5% reduction in perceived cognitive load when using concept maps, despite spending more time with the visualization (22.6% increase). They also completed comprehension assessments more efficiently (14.1% faster) with comparable accuracy. This work demonstrates that LLM-based concept mapping can significantly reduce cognitive demands while supporting non-linear exploration.

Beyond Linear Digital Reading: An LLM-Powered Concept Mapping Approach for Reducing Cognitive Load

Correct verb placement is difficult to acquire for second-language learners of Germanic languages. However, word order errors and, consequently, verb placement errors, are heavily underrepresented in benchmark datasets of NLP tasks such as grammatical error detection/correction and linguistic acceptability assessment. If they are present, they are most often naively introduced, or classification occurs at the sentence level, preventing the precise identification of individual errors and the provision of appropriate feedback to learners. To remedy this, we present GermDetect: Universal Dependencies-based, linguistically informed verb placement error detection datasets for learners of Germanic languages, designed as a token classification task. As our datasets are UD-based, we are able to provide them in most major Germanic languages: Afrikaans, German, Dutch, Faroese, Icelandic, Danish, Norwegian (Bokmål and Nynorsk), and Swedish.

We train multilingual BERT models on GermDetect and show that linguistically informed, UD-based error induction results in more effective models for verb placement error detection than models trained on naively introduced errors. Finally, we conduct ablation studies on multilingual training and find that lower-resource languages benefit from the inclusion of structurally related languages in training.

GermDetect: Verb Placement Error Detection Datasets for Learners of Germanic Languages

This study examines vulnerabilities in transformer-based automated short-answer grading systems used in medical education, with a focus on how these systems can be manipulated through adversarial gaming strategies. Our research identifies three main types of gaming strategies that exploit the system's weaknesses, potentially leading to false positives. To counteract these vulnerabilities, we implement several adversarial training methods designed to enhance the system's robustness. Our results indicate that these methods significantly reduce the susceptibility of grading systems to such manipulations, especially when combined with ensemble techniques like majority voting and Ridge regression, which further improve the system's defense against sophisticated adversarial inputs. Additionally, employing large language models suchasGPT-4with varied prompting techniques has shown promise in recognizing and scoring gaming strategies effectively. The findings underscore the importance of continuous improvements in AI-driven educational tools to ensure their reliability and fairness in high-stakes settings.

Enhancing Security and Strengthening Defenses in Automated Short-Answer Grading Systems

Recent advances in LLMs offer new opportunities for supporting student writing, particularly through real-time, composition-level feedback. However, for such support to be effective, LLMs need to generate text completions that align with the writer's internal representation of their developing message, a representation that is often implicit and difficult to observe. This paper investigates the use of eye-tracking data, specifically lookback fixations during pauses in text production, as a cue to this internal representation. Using eye movement data from students composing texts, we compare human-generated completions with LLM-generated completions based on prompts that either include or exclude words and sentences fixated during pauses. We find that incorporating lookback fixations enhances human-LLM alignment in generating text completions. These results provide empirical support for generating fixation-aware LLM feedback and lay the foundation for future educational tools that deliver real-time, composition-level feedback grounded in writers' attention and cognitive processes.

EyeLLM: Using Lookback Fixations to Enhance Human-LLM Alignment for Text Completion

We present a method for labeling spans of text with large language models (LLMs) and apply it to the task of identifying shell language, language which plays a structural or connective role without constituting the main content of a text. We compare several recent LLMs by evaluating their "annotations" against a small human-curated test set, and train a smaller supervised model on thousands of LLM-annotated examples. The described method enables workflows that can learn complex or nuanced linguistic phenomena without tedious, large-scale hand-annotations of training data or specialized feature engineering.

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

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Next from ACL 2025

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

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Automated Evaluation of Teacher Encouragement of Student-to-Student Interactions in a Simulated Classroom Discussion

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

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RESOURCES

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