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