It is standardly believed that some occurrences of expressions designate singularly, while other occurrences of expressions designate plurally. For instance, the singular expression the student may be used on an occasion to talk about one particular student, while the plural expression the students may be used on an occasion to talk about several…

With the generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool's remarkable capabilities in understanding and generating meaningful content, intriguing questions have been raised about its potential as an automated essay scoring (AES) system. One such tool is ChatGPT, which is capable of scoring any written work based on predefined criteria. However,…

Investigations on the utility of reflective essays in engineering education are firmly grounded in the theory of metacognition. Besides being a tool to measure metacognition, insight acquired from assessing reflective essays can provide context for future instruction and assessment. Some challenges that hinder the critical assessment of reflective…

The use of subordination enables language users to achieve syntactic efficiency by allowing them to connect ideas in temporal/logical relation. Although the importance of subordination has been recognized in previous research on second language (L2) writing, it has been typically assessed with global indices that measure overall ratio of…

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) is a well-studied problem in Natural Language Processing applied in education. Solutions vary from handcrafted linguistic features to large Transformer-based models, implying a significant effort in feature extraction and model implementation. We introduce a novel Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) pipeline…

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) is a well-studied problem in Natural Language Processing applied in education. Solutions vary from handcrafted linguistic features to large Transformer-based models, implying a significant effort in feature extraction and model implementation. We introduce a novel Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) pipeline…

There is a current debate about the extent to which ChatGPT, a natural language AI chatbot, can disrupt processes in higher education settings. The chatbot is capable of not only answering queries in a human-like way within seconds but can also provide long tracts of texts which can be in the form of essays, emails, and coding. In this study, in…

Automatic essay scoring (AES) is an essential educational application in natural language processing. This automated process will alleviate the burden by increasing the reliability and consistency of the assessment. With the advances in text embedding libraries and neural network models, AES systems achieved good results in terms of accuracy.…

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been evolving since the mid-twentieth-century when luminaries such as Alan Turing, Herbert Simon, and Marvin Minsky began developing rudimentary AI applications. For decades, AI programs remained pretty much in the realm of computer science and experimental game playing. This changed radically in the 2020s when…

The release of ChatGPT in 2022 has generated extensive speculation about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will impact the capacity of institutions for higher learning to achieve their central missions of promoting learning and certifying knowledge. Our main questions were whether people could identify AI-generated text and whether factors such as…

Background: Assignments that involve writing based on several texts are challenging to many learners. Formative feedback supporting learners in these tasks should be informed by the characteristics of evolving written product and by the characteristics of learning processes learners enacted while developing the product. However, formative feedback…

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) using neural networks has helped increase the accuracy and efficiency of scoring students' written tasks. Generally, the improved accuracy of neural network approaches has been attributed to the use of modern word embedding techniques. However, which word embedding techniques produce higher accuracy in AES systems…

Technological tools, like virtual assistants (aka chatbots), have been ubiquitous in people's day to day. The challenge becomes how educators leverage digital omnipresence to benefit the learning environment. Using a curated chatbot allows educators to reach more students with instructor-approved information, particularly in large classrooms.…

Lexical frequency benchmarks have been extensively used to investigate second language (L2) lexical sophistication, especially in language assessment studies. However, indices based on semantic co-occurrence, which may be a better representation of the experience language users have with lexical items, have not been sufficiently tested as…

Large Language Models (LLM) -- powerful algorithms that can generate and transform text -- are set to disrupt language learning education and text-based assessments as they allow for automation of text that can meet certain outcomes of many traditional assessments such as essays. While there is no way to definitively identify text created by this…