This paper introduces the Chinese Essay Discourse Coherence Corpus (CEDCC), a multi-task dataset for assessing discourse coherence. Existing research tends to focus on isolated dimensions of discourse coherence, a gap which the CEDCC addresses by integrating coherence grading, topical continuity, and discourse relations. This approach, alongside detailed annotations, captures the subtleties of real-world texts and stimulates progress in Chinese discourse coherence analysis. Our contributions include the development of the CEDCC, the establishment of baselines for further research, and the demonstration of the impact of coherence on discourse relation recognition and automated essay scoring. The dataset and related codes is available at https://github.com/cubenlp/CEDCC_corpus.

“This paper provides a comprehensive review of the CCL23-Eval Task 8, i.e., Chinese EssayFluency Evaluation (CEFE). The primary aim of this task is to systematically identify the typesof grammatical fine-grained errors that affect the readability and coherence of essays writtenby Chinese primary and secondary school students, and then to suggest suitable corrections toenhance the fluidity of their written expression. This task consists of three distinct tracks: (1)Coarse-grained and fine-grained error identification; (2) Character-level error identification andcorrection; (3) Error sentence rewriting. In the end, we received 44 completed registration forms,leading to a total of 130 submissions from 11 dedicated participating teams. We present theresults of all participants and our analysis of these results. Both the dataset and evaluation toolused in this task are available1.”

Enhancing word usage is a desired feature for writing assistance. To further advance research in this area, this paper introduces “Smart Word Suggestions” (SWS) task and benchmark. Unlike other works, SWS emphasizes end-to-end evaluation and presents a more realistic writing assistance scenario. This task involves identifying words or phrases that require improvement and providing substitution suggestions. The benchmark includes human-labeled data for testing, a large distantly supervised dataset for training, and the framework for evaluation. The test data includes 1,000 sentences written by English learners, accompanied by over 16,000 substitution suggestions annotated by 10 native speakers. The training dataset comprises over 3.7 million sentences and 12.7 million suggestions generated through rules. Our experiments with seven baselines demonstrate that SWS is a challenging task. Based on experimental analysis, we suggest potential directions for future research on SWS. The dataset and related codes will be available for research purposes.