Learning argumentative writing is challenging. Besides writing fundamentals such as syntax and grammar, learners must select and arrange argument components meaningfully to create high-quality essays. To support argumentative writing computationally, one step is to mine the argumentative structure. When combined with automatic essay scoring, interactions of the argumentative structure and quality scores can be exploited for comprehensive writing support. Although studies have shown the usefulness of using information about the argumentative structure for essay scoring, no argument mining corpus with ground-truth essay quality annotations has been published yet. Moreover, none of the existing corpora contain essays written by school students specifically. To fill this research gap, we present a German corpus of 1,320 essays from school students of two age groups. Each essay has been manually annotated for argumentative structure and quality on multiple levels of granularity. We propose baseline approaches to argument mining and essay scoring, and we analyze interactions between both tasks, thereby laying the ground for quality-oriented argumentative writing support.

Individual feedback can help students improve their essay writing skills. However, the manual effort required to provide such feedback limits individualization in practice. Automatically-generated essay feedback may serve as an alternative to guide students at their own pace, convenience, and desired frequency. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in generating coherent and contextually relevant text. Yet, their ability to provide helpful essay feedback is unclear. This work explores several prompting strategies for LLM-based zero-shot and few-shot generation of essay feedback. Inspired by Chain-of-Thought prompting, we study how and to what extent automated essay scoring (AES) can benefit the quality of generated feedback. We evaluate both the AES performance that LLMs can achieve with prompting only and the helpfulness of the generated essay feedback. Our results suggest that tackling AES and feedback generation jointly improves AES performance. However, while our manual evaluation emphasizes the quality of the generated essay feedback, the impact of essay scoring on the generated feedback remains low ultimately.

In this paper, we introduce the task of style-consistent content transfer, which concerns modifying a text’s content based on a provided reference statement while preserving its original style. We approach the task by employing multi-task learning to ensure that the modified text meets three important conditions: reference faithfulness, style adherence, and coherence. In particular, we train three independent classifiers for each condition. During inference, these classifiers are used to determine the best modified text variant. Our evaluation, conducted on hotel reviews and news articles, compares our approach with sequence-to-sequence and error correction baselines. The results demonstrate that our approach reasonably generates text satisfying all three conditions. In subsequent analyses, we highlight the strengths and limitations of our approach, providing valuable insights for future research directions.

Writing strong arguments can be challenging for learners. It requires to select and arrange multiple argumentative discourse units (ADUs) in a logical and coherent way as well as to decide which ADUs to leave implicit, so called enthymemes. However, when important ADUs are missing, readers might not be able to follow the reasoning or understand the argument’s main point. This paper introduces two new tasks for learner arguments: to identify gaps in arguments (enthymeme detection) and to fill such gaps (enthymeme reconstruction). Approaches to both tasks may help learners improve their argument quality. We study how corpora for these tasks can be created automatically by deleting ADUs from an argumentative text that are central to the argument and its quality, while maintaining the text’s naturalness. Based on the ICLEv3 corpus of argumentative learner essays, we create 40,089 argument instances for enthymeme detection and reconstruction. Through manual studies, we provide evidence that the proposed corpus creation process leads to the desired quality reduction, and results in arguments that are similarly natural to those written by learners. Finally, first baseline approaches to enthymeme detection and reconstruction demonstrate the corpus’ usefulness.

In the context of language learning, feedback comment generation is the task of generating hints or explanatory notes for learner texts that help understand why a part of text is erroneous. This paper presents our approach to the Feedback Comment Generation Shared Task, collocated with the 16th International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG 2023). The approach augments the generation of feedback comments by a self-supervised identification of feedback types in a multitasklearning setting. Within the shared task, other approaches performed more effective, yet the combined modeling of feedback type classification and feedback comment generation is superior to performing eedback generation only.

Gender bias may emerge from an unequal representation of agency and power, for example, by portraying women frequently as passive and powerless (“She accepted her future”) and men as proactive and powerful (“He chose his future”). When language models learn from respective texts, they may reproduce or even amplify the bias. An effective way to mitigate bias is to generate counterfactual sentences with opposite agency and power to the training. Recent work targeted agency-specific verbs from a lexicon to this end. We argue that this is insufficient, due to the interaction of agency and power and their dependence on context. In this paper, we thus develop a new rewriting model that identifies verbs with the desired agency and power in the context of the given sentence. The verbs’ probability is then boosted to encourage the model to rewrite both connotations jointly. According to automatic metrics, our model effectively controls for power while being competitive in agency to the state of the art. In our main evaluation, human annotators favored its counterfactuals in terms of both connotations, also deeming its meaning preservation better.

An argument is a constellation of premises reasoning towards a certain conclusion. The automatic generation of conclusions is becoming a very prominent task, raising the need for automatic measures to assess the quality of these generated conclusions. The SharedTask at the 9th Workshop on Argument Mining proposes a new task to assess the novelty and validity of a conclusion given a set of premises. In this paper, we present a multitask learning approach that transfers the knowledge learned from the natural language inference task to the tasks at hand. Evaluation results indicate the importance of both knowledge transfer and joint learning, placing our approach in the fifth place with strong results compared to baselines.