arXiv Computation and Language

Accurate but Natural? Diagnosing Grammatical and Idiomatic Gaps in Japanese EFL Writing

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 21

Not All Irregularity Is Equal: Causally Isolating a Rare Failure Mode in Japanese Morphological Inflection

The paper investigates Japanese past‑tense verb inflection in neural morphological generation systems, focusing on a rare irregular subtype where stems end in /e/ and require gemination before the suffix. Despite overall high accuracy (>97%), this <1% subclass accounts for 30–43% of residual errors, amplifying its impact by 34–48 times its frequency. Ablation experiments show that removing this specific subtype yields larger accuracy gains than removing all irregular verbs, highlighting the role of low‑frequency patterns and orthographic processes in error concentration.

By Wen Zhang
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 22

From prompting to evidence-based translation: A RAG+prompt system for Japanese-Chinese translation and its pedagogical potential

The paper presents a retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) system combined with prompt engineering for Japanese‑to‑Chinese translation, focusing on sentences with noun‑modifying clause constructions (NMCCs). It integrates linguistic analysis, embedding‑based retrieval, and prompt construction before generating translations with GPT‑4o, without altering the base model. Experiments on a 66‑sentence test set show that increasing the knowledge‑base size from 0 to 2,000 examples raises macro‑averaged BLEU scores from 24.28 to 29.96, indicating improved translation quality for NMCC‑rich sentences.

By Wenshi Gu
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 7

Agreement Is Not Validity: Cross-Model LLM Consensus in Diagnosing Student Failure Modes in K-12 Math Tutoring Dialogue

arXiv:2610.08703v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In K-12 mathematics tutoring, student-tutor dialogue provides rich evidence of learners' problem-solving processes and sources of difficulty. Learning...

By Clayton Cohn, Joyce Fonteles, Kirk Vanacore, Gianni Mazza, Candida Crawford, Tom Hooper, Gautam Biswas, Rene Kizilcec
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 Computation and Language
Sep 3

A Layered Taxonomy for Chinese Learner Grammatical Error Annotation

The paper introduces a layered taxonomy for annotating grammatical errors in Chinese learner writing, aiming for consistency and linguistic relevance. It first classifies character- and punctuation-level orthographic errors by edit operation and subtype, then assigns other errors a three-layer core label that combines edit operation, linguistic domain, and part of speech, with optional Chinese-specific extensions. The taxonomy is evaluated through coverage analysis of automatically extracted edits and a preliminary consistency study using five large language models, confirming the layered approach while highlighting areas needing refinement.

By Mengyang Qiu, Jungyeul Park
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

Contextual Tamil Spelling and Grammar Correction Using Progressively Fine-Tuned Sequence-to-Sequence Transformers

The paper presents an end‑to‑end sequence‑to‑sequence approach for correcting Tamil spelling and grammar errors, leveraging progressively fine‑tuned transformer models (mT5‑small and mBART‑50). Using a synthetic corpus of 657,720 noisy‑clean sentence pairs across ten error categories, the authors introduce a four‑stage training schedule that targets surface noise, contextual grammar, single‑site sandhi, and multi‑site cross‑word sandhi. The best model, mBART‑50 v5, achieves 69.3% exact‑match accuracy on a balanced diagnostic set, with notable gains in sandhi (87.5%) and subject‑verb agreement (43.5%) accuracy, while also revealing a precision‑recall trade‑off for sandhi corrections.

By Karthikeyan A, Jaya Nirmala S, Sangeetha Sivanesan, Indhu R, Pranav Kumar, Bharat Jude Johnson, Vishnu Ram
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
Aug 5

M-GATE: Multilingual Grammar, Accuracy in Translation, and Efficiency Benchmark for Large Language Models

arXiv:2608. 03803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual language models are deployed across a hundred or more languages, yet most benchmarks test whether a model can perform a task _in_ a language rather than whether it commands the language itself, conflating fluency with proficiency.

By Tom\'a\v{s} Burkert, Angelika Peljak-{\L}api\'nska, David Zelen\'y