Sequence tagging in EFL Email texts as feedback for language learners

Conference contribution (Article)ResearchPeer reviewed

Publication data


ByYuning Ding, Ruth Trüb, Johanna Fleckenstein, Stefan Keller, Andrea Horbach
Original languageEnglish
Published inProceedings of the 12th Workshop on NLP for Computer Assisted Language Learning: (NLP4CALL 2023)
Pages53-62
Editor (Publisher)LiU Electronic Press
DOI/Linkhttps://aclanthology.org/2023.nlp4call-1.7/ (Open Access)
Publication statusPublished – 2023

When predicting scores for different aspects of a learner text, automated scoring algorithms usually cannot provide information about which part of text a score is referring to. We therefore propose a method to automatically segment learner texts as a way towards providing visual feedback. We train a neural sequence tagging model and use it to segment EFL email texts into functional segments. Our algorithm reaches a token-based accuracy of 90% when trained per prompt and between 83 and 87% in a cross-prompt scenario.