FEAT-writing: An Interactive Training System for Argumentative Writing

Yuning Ding, Franziska Wehrhahn, Andrea Horbach


Abstract
Recent developments in Natural Language Processing (NLP) for argument mining offer new opportunities to analyze the argumentative units (AUs) in student essays. These advancements can be leveraged to provide automatically generated feedback and exercises for students engaging in online argumentative essay writing practice. Writing standards for both native English speakers (L1) and English-as-a-foreign-language (L2) learners require students to understand formal essay structures and different AUs. To address this need, we developed FEAT-writing (Feedback and Exercises for Argumentative Training in writing), an interactive system that provides students with automatically generated exercises and distinct feedback on their argumentative writing. In a preliminary evaluation involving 346 students, we assessed the impact of six different automated feedback types on essay quality, with results showing general improvements in writing after receiving feedback from the system.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-demos.22
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert, Brodie Mather, Mark Dras
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
217–225
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-demos.22/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuning Ding, Franziska Wehrhahn, and Andrea Horbach. 2025. FEAT-writing: An Interactive Training System for Argumentative Writing. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, pages 217–225, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
FEAT-writing: An Interactive Training System for Argumentative Writing (Ding et al., COLING 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-demos.22.pdf