Lexical substitute generation is a task where we generate substitutes for a given word to fit in the required context. It is one of the main steps for automatic lexical simplifcation. In this paper, we introduce an automatic lexical simplification system using the GPT-3 large language model. The system generates simplified candidate substitutions for complex words to aid readability and comprehension for the reader. The paper describes the system that we submitted for the Multilingual Lexical Simplification Pipeline Shared Task at the 2024 BEA Workshop. During the shared task, we experimented with Catalan, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and German for the Lexical Simplification Shared Task. We achieved the best results in Catalan and Portuguese, and were runners-up in English, French and Italian. To further research in this domain, we also release our code upon acceptance of the paper.

In this paper, we describe our approach to generate and rank candidate simplifications using pre-trained language models (Eg. BERT), publicly available word embeddings (Eg. FastText), and a part-of-speech tagger, to generate and rank candidate contextual simplifications for a given complex word. In this task, our system, PresiUniv, was placed first in the Spanish track, 5th in the Brazilian-Portuguese track, and 10th in the English track. We upload our codes and data for this project to aid in replication of our results. We also analyze some of the errors and describe design decisions which we took while writing the paper.

Most research in the area of automatic essay grading (AEG) is geared towards scoring the essay holistically while there has also been little work done on scoring individual essay traits. In this paper, we describe a way to score essays using a multi-task learning (MTL) approach, where scoring the essay holistically is the primary task, and scoring the essay traits is the auxiliary task. We compare our results with a single-task learning (STL) approach, using both LSTMs and BiLSTMs. To find out which traits work best for different types of essays, we conduct ablation tests for each of the essay traits. We also report the runtime and number of training parameters for each system. We find that MTL-based BiLSTM system gives the best results for scoring the essay holistically, as well as performing well on scoring the essay traits. The MTL systems also give a speed-up of between 2.30 to 3.70 times the speed of the STL system, when it comes to scoring the essay and all the traits.

The gaze behaviour of a reader is helpful in solving several NLP tasks such as automatic essay grading. However, collecting gaze behaviour from readers is costly in terms of time and money. In this paper, we propose a way to improve automatic essay grading using gaze behaviour, which is learnt at run time using a multi-task learning framework. To demonstrate the efficacy of this multi-task learning based approach to automatic essay grading, we collect gaze behaviour for 48 essays across 4 essay sets, and learn gaze behaviour for the rest of the essays, numbering over 7000 essays. Using the learnt gaze behaviour, we can achieve a statistically significant improvement in performance over the state-of-the-art system for the essay sets where we have gaze data. We also achieve a statistically significant improvement for 4 other essay sets, numbering about 6000 essays, where we have no gaze behaviour data available. Our approach establishes that learning gaze behaviour improves automatic essay grading.

Essay traits are attributes of an essay that can help explain how well written (or badly written) the essay is. Examples of traits include Content, Organization, Language, Sentence Fluency, Word Choice, etc. A lot of research in the last decade has dealt with automatic holistic essay scoring - where a machine rates an essay and gives a score for the essay. However, writers need feedback, especially if they want to improve their writing - which is why trait-scoring is important. In this paper, we show how a deep-learning based system can outperform feature-based machine learning systems, as well as a string kernel system in scoring essay traits.

Automatic essay grading (AEG) is a process in which machines assign a grade to an essay written in response to a topic, called the prompt. Zero-shot AEG is when we train a system to grade essays written to a new prompt which was not present in our training data. In this paper, we describe a solution to the problem of zero-shot automatic essay grading, using cognitive information, in the form of gaze behaviour. Our experiments show that using gaze behaviour helps in improving the performance of AEG systems, especially when we provide a new essay written in response to a new prompt for scoring, by an average of almost 5 percentage points of QWK.

Predicting a reader’s rating of text quality is a challenging task that involves estimating different subjective aspects of the text, like structure, clarity, etc. Such subjective aspects are better handled using cognitive information. One such source of cognitive information is gaze behaviour. In this paper, we show that gaze behaviour does indeed help in effectively predicting the rating of text quality. To do this, we first we model text quality as a function of three properties - organization, coherence and cohesion. Then, we demonstrate how capturing gaze behaviour helps in predicting each of these properties, and hence the overall quality, by reporting improvements obtained by adding gaze features to traditional textual features for score prediction. We also hypothesize that if a reader has fully understood the text, the corresponding gaze behaviour would give a better indication of the assigned rating, as opposed to partial understanding. Our experiments validate this hypothesis by showing greater agreement between the given rating and the predicted rating when the reader has a full understanding of the text.

In this paper, we present an effective system using voting ensemble classifiers to detect contextually complex words for non-native English speakers. To make the final decision, we channel a set of eight calibrated classifiers based on lexical, size and vocabulary features and train our model with annotated datasets collected from a mixture of native and non-native speakers. Thereafter, we test our system on three datasets namely News, WikiNews, and Wikipedia and report competitive results with an F1-Score ranging between 0.777 to 0.855 for each of the datasets. Our system outperforms multiple other models and falls within 0.042 to 0.026 percent of the best-performing model’s score in the shared task.

Essays have two major components for scoring - content and style. In this paper, we describe a property of the essay, called goodness, and use it to predict the score given for the style of student essays. We compare our approach to solve this problem with baseline approaches, like language modeling and also a state-of-the-art deep learning system. We show that, despite being quite intuitive, our approach is very powerful in predicting the style of the essays.