arXiv Machine Learning

A Durability and Cross-Language Transfer Benchmark for a Validated Teaching-Feedback Classification Protocol

arXiv:2607. 11873v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Institutions collect far more open-ended teaching-evaluation feedback than they read.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 13

A Durability and Cross-Language Transfer Benchmark for a Validated Teaching-Feedback Classification Protocol

Institutions collect far more open-ended teaching-evaluation feedback than they read. A prior study introduced a validated protocol for classifying such comments by thematic category and sentiment, built from a documented annotation guide, an intra-annotator reliability measurement, stratified cross-validation, and a held-out evaluation on a Spanish institutional corpus with a frozen-encoder design.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Manac\'a-1B: An Open, Reproducible Brazilian-Portuguese Language Model and a Tokenizer-Aware, Paired Evaluation

Manacá-1B is a 1.72‑billion‑parameter, open decoder‑only language model trained from scratch for Brazilian Portuguese, released with a fully containerized, reproducible training pipeline and complete logs. The authors evaluate it against nine open baselines on four Portuguese benchmarks, reporting standard errors and paired significance tests, and find that Manacá-1B outperforms smaller models on LAMBADA‑PT while remaining competitive on commonsense completion. They also uncover a tokenizer‑related evaluation pitfall that can drastically lower accuracy and provide a simple fix, releasing all code, logs, and corrected tokenizer for full reproducibility.

By Bruno Leonardo Santos Menezes, Carlos Leonardo Souza Cardoso, Fabio Andre Machado Porto
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

IDEAlign: Comparing Ideas of Large Language Models to Domain Expert

IDEAlign introduces a new protocol for evaluating the similarity of large language model (LLM) annotations to expert judgments. It uses pick‑the‑odd‑one‑out tasks to capture expert similarity and benchmarks various similarity methods—including text embeddings, topic models, and LLM-as-a-judge—against these human ratings. Applied to educational datasets, the study finds that most metrics miss nuanced expert dimensions, with LLM-as-a-judge performing best yet still insufficient for full expert alignment.

By Hyunji Nam, Lucia Langlois, James Malamut, Mei Tan, Dorottya Demszky
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Apples to Apples? Towards Comparable Crosslingual Language Model Evaluation

The paper investigates how to fairly compare language models across languages, noting that current evaluation methods vary widely and lack empirical validation. By training controlled monolingual models on parallel data and testing multilingual LLMs, the authors find that many normalized metrics suffer from biases due to tokenization, encoding, and orthographic differences. Instead, they recommend using sentence‑level negative log‑likelihood over semantically equivalent sequences for more reliable cross‑lingual comparisons.

By Xiulin Yang, Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox, Catherine Arnett
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

From Sentiment Classification to Actionable and Responsible Feedback: A Scoping Review and Evidence Map of NLP in Student Evaluation of Teaching, 2015-2026

This scoping review examines 421 studies (2015‑2026) on natural language processing applied to student evaluation of teaching comments. It maps the technical evolution from lexicons and classifiers to transformers and large language models, and evaluates four value dimensions. The review identifies a significant gap between actionable outputs (61.3%) and intended‑user evaluation (11.6%), highlighting limited progress in educational value and robustness.

By Jeff Eicher, Rafael da Silva
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

Improving Cross-Lingual Transfer for Sequential Sentence Classification in Research Papers via Structural Similarity

The paper investigates cross‑lingual transfer for sequential sentence classification (SSC) in research papers, focusing on 13 non‑English languages. Experiments show that linguistic proximity does not reliably predict transfer success, whereas structural similarity in rhetorical organization—particularly label distribution similarity—correlates positively with performance. The authors introduce three generative‑model methods that exploit structural cues, achieving parity with strong encoder baselines on‑domain and outperforming them when transferring to unseen languages.

By Kazuhiro Yamauchi, Marie Katsurai