arXiv Computation and Language

Error-Supervised Synthetic Learner Writing for Automated Essay Scoring

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

Limits of LLM Text Detectors in Education

The paper "Limits of LLM Text Detectors in Education" argues that existing LLM‑generated text detectors assume a binary human/LLM distinction, which fails to capture realistic student‑AI collaboration. It introduces a contribution‑aware evaluation framework with eight student contribution levels and presents GEDE, a benchmark of over 900 human‑written and 12,500 generated essays across 886 tasks. Using GEDE, the authors evaluate four detection methods and find that most detectors perform poorly on intermediate contribution levels, especially LLM‑assisted revisions, raising concerns about false accusations.

By Lukas Gehring, Benjamin Paa{\ss}en
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 16

Does Continued Pretraining on a Learner Corpus Improve Automated Essay Scoring on English Proficiency Tests? Evidence from EFCAMDAT

The study examines whether domain‑adaptive continued pretraining (DAPT) on a learner‑writing corpus (EFCAMDAT) can enhance transformer‑based automated essay scoring (AES) for English proficiency tests. Researchers applied DAPT to BERT, RoBERTa, and DistilBERT and compared the adapted models with their original checkpoints on the FCE and IELTS datasets, evaluating both in‑domain scoring and few‑shot cross‑dataset transfer. Results show that full‑corpus DAPT yields mixed effects, while proficiency‑specific DAPT often outperforms full‑corpus DAPT and sometimes even the non‑adapted baseline, though benefits vary by proficiency composition and encoder architecture and do not consistently transfer across tests.

By Duy Anh Nguyen
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 4

SWIM: Student Writing Simulation via Proficiency-Conditioned Generation

The paper introduces SWIM, a task that frames student writing simulation as proficiency‑conditioned essay generation. It evaluates prompting, supervised fine‑tuning, and reinforcement learning for aligning generated essays with student proficiency profiles, using automated essay scoring as a metric. Results show that prompting alone offers limited control, while supervised fine‑tuning and reinforcement learning significantly improve alignment across content, lexical, grammatical, and organizational traits, though low‑proficiency writing remains difficult to replicate.

By Heejin Do, Jakub Kontak, Mrinmaya Sachan
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 15

An Empirical Analysis of Factual Errors in Human-Written Text and Its Application to Factual Error Detection

The paper presents an empirical study of factual errors in human-written text, focusing on corrections in newspaper articles to build a taxonomy of common mistakes such as kanji misconversions and unit errors. It evaluates large language models’ ability to detect these errors, finding that even advanced models like GPT‑5.4 achieve only a 52% word‑level F1 score on synthetic data, underscoring the difficulty of the task. The work highlights the gap in research on factual error detection in human writing compared to LLM hallucinations.

By Kazuma Iwamoto, Kazumasa Omura, Shotaro Ishihara
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Value Over Language Model: Detecting Original Contribution in Writing

The paper introduces VOLM, a framework that quantifies how much original value a human adds to a document beyond what a language model could generate from a task description alone. Unlike existing tools that focus on stylistic detection, VOLM extracts content at varying granularities, reconstructs it with an LLM, and compares these reconstructions to those derived from the task description. Evaluations across news articles, ICLR peer reviews, and argumentative essays show that VOLM can distinguish human-authored texts from LLM-generated ones while remaining robust to content-preserving transformations.

By Vibhhu Sharma, Thorsten Joachims, Sarah Dean
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

Trait-Aware Policy Optimization for Autoregressive Multi-Trait Essay Scoring

The paper introduces Trait-Aware Policy Optimization (TAPO), a post‑training framework for autoregressive models that score essays across multiple traits. TAPO decomposes rewards by sample and trait, integrating global consistency, trait accuracy, format validity, and inter‑trait dependencies, while enriching prompts with trait descriptions. Experiments on various backbone models show TAPO consistently outperforms supervised fine‑tuning and scalar‑reward baselines, proving its effectiveness and transferability for multi‑trait essay scoring.

By Zhengyang Wang, Sanwoo Lee, Jiaxin Wang, Chenxi Miao, Weikang Li, Yunfang Wu