Automated essay scoring (AES) to evaluate second language (L2) proficiency has been a firmly established technology used in educational contexts for decades. Although holistic scoring has seen advancements in AES that match or even exceed human performance, analytic scoring still encounters issues as it inherits flaws and shortcomings from the human scoring process. The recent introduction of large language models presents new opportunities for automating the evaluation of specific aspects of L2 writing proficiency. In this paper, we perform a series of experiments using GPT-4 in a zero-shot fashion on a publicly available dataset annotated with holistic scores based on the Common European Framework of Reference and aim to extract detailed information about their underlying analytic components. We observe significant correlations between the automatically predicted analytic scores and multiple features associated with the individual proficiency components.

The paper describes BUT’s English to German offline speech translation (ST) systems developed for IWSLT2021. They are based on jointly trained Automatic Speech Recognition-Machine Translation models. Their performances is evaluated on MustC-Common test set. In this work, we study their efficiency from the perspective of having a large amount of separate ASR training data and MT training data, and a smaller amount of speech-translation training data. Large amounts of ASR and MT training data are utilized for pre-training the ASR and MT models. Speech-translation data is used to jointly optimize ASR-MT models by defining an end-to-end differentiable path from speech to translations. For this purpose, we use the internal continuous representations from the ASR-decoder as the input to MT module. We show that speech translation can be further improved by training the ASR-decoder jointly with the MT-module using large amount of text-only MT training data. We also show significant improvements by training an ASR module capable of generating punctuated text, rather than leaving the punctuation task to the MT module.