Chain-of-MetaWriting: Linguistic and Textual Analysis of How Small Language Models Write Young Students Texts

Ioana Buhnila, Georgeta Cislaru, Amalia Todirascu


Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have been used to generate texts in response to different writing tasks: reports, essays, story telling. However, language models do not have a metarepresentation of the text writing process, nor inherent communication learning needs, comparable to those of young human students. This paper introduces a fine-grained linguistic and textual analysis of multilingual Small Language Models’ (SLMs) writing. With our method, Chain-of-MetaWriting, SLMs can imitate some steps of the human writing process, such as planning and evaluation. We mainly focused on short story and essay writing tasks in French for schoolchildren and undergraduate students respectively. Our results show that SLMs encounter difficulties in assisting young students on sensitive topics such as violence in the schoolyard, and they sometimes use words too complex for the target audience. In particular, the output is quite different from the human produced texts in term of text cohesion and coherence regarding temporal connectors, topic progression, reference.
Anthology ID:
2025.wraicogs-1.1
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Writing Aids at the Crossroads of AI, Cognitive Science and NLP (WRAICOGS 2025)
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Michael Zock, Kentaro Inui, Zheng Yuan
Venues:
WRAICOGS | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–15
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.wraicogs-1.1/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ioana Buhnila, Georgeta Cislaru, and Amalia Todirascu. 2025. Chain-of-MetaWriting: Linguistic and Textual Analysis of How Small Language Models Write Young Students Texts. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Writing Aids at the Crossroads of AI, Cognitive Science and NLP (WRAICOGS 2025), pages 1–15, Abu Dhabi, UAE. International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Chain-of-MetaWriting: Linguistic and Textual Analysis of How Small Language Models Write Young Students Texts (Buhnila et al., WRAICOGS 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.wraicogs-1.1.pdf