In this article, we discuss ethical issues related to using and disclosing artificial intelligence (AI) tools, such as ChatGPT and other systems based on large language models (LLMs), to write or edit scholarly manuscripts. Some journals, such as "Science," have banned the use of LLMs because of the ethical problems they raise concerning…

Background: Competency models provide useful frameworks for organizing learning and assessment programs, but their construction is both time intensive and subject to perceptual biases. Some aspects of model development may be particularly well-suited to automation, specifically natural language processing (NLP), which could also help make them…

Due to the increasing demand for efficient, effective, and profitable applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in various industries, there is an immense need for professionals with the right skills to meet this demand. As a result, several institutions have started to offer AI programs. Yet, there is a notable gap in academia: the absence of…

In an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS), problem (or question) difficulty is one of the most critical parameters, directly impacting problem design, test paper organization, result analysis, and even the fairness guarantee. However, it is very difficult to evaluate the problem difficulty by organized pre-tests or by expertise, because these…

Providing timely feedback is crucial in promoting academic achievement and student success. However, for multifarious reasons (e.g., limited teaching resources), feedback often arrives too late for learners to act on the feedback and improve learning. Thus, automated feedback systems have emerged to tackle educational tasks in various domains,…

Second language learners constitute a significant and expanding portion of the global population and there is a growing demand for tools that facilitate language learning and instruction across various levels and in different countries. The development of large language models (LLMs) has brought about a significant impact on the domains of natural…

Dialogue systems, commonly called as Chatbots, have gained escalating popularity in recent times due to their wide-spread applications in carrying out chit-chat conversations with users and accomplishing tasks as personal assistants. These systems are typically trained from manually-labeled data and/or written with handcrafted rules and often, use…

This paper explores recent advancements and implications of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, with a specific focus on Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT 3.5, within the realm of higher education. Through a comprehensive review of the academic literature, this paper highlights the unprecedented growth of these models and their…

"Natural language understanding" (NLU) of text is a fundamental challenge in AI, and it has received significant attention throughout the history of NLP research. This primary goal has been studied under different tasks, such as Question Answering (QA) and Textual Entailment (TE). In this thesis, we investigate the NLU problem through…

We present a tool for the creation and curation of C-tests. C-tests are an established tool in language proficiency testing and language learning. They require examinees to complete a text in which the second half of every second word is replaced by a gap. We support teachers and test designers in creating such tests through a web-based system…

This study examined the development of text complexity for the past 25 years of reading comprehension passages in the National Matriculation English Test (NMET) in China. Text complexity of 206 reading passages at lexical, syntactic, and discourse levels has been measured longitudinally and compared across the years. The natural language…

We present SimpleApprenant, a platform aiming to improve French L2 learners' knowledge of Multi Word Expressions (MWEs). SimpleApprenant integrates an MWE database annotated with the Common European Framework of Reference for languages (CEFR) level and several Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools: a spelling checker, a parser, and a set of…

We address the issue of consumer privacy against the backdrop of the national priority of maintaining global leadership in artificial intelligence, the ongoing research in Artificial Cognitive Assistants, and the explosive growth in the development and application of Voice Activated Personal Assistants (VAPAs) such as Alexa and Siri, spurred on by…

An important, yet largely unstudied problem in student data analysis is to detect "misconceptions" from students' responses to "open-response" questions. Misconception detection enables instructors to deliver more targeted feedback on the misconceptions exhibited by many students in their class, thus improving the quality of…

This document describes a solution to a problem in the automatic content scoring of the multilingual character-by-character highlighting item type. This solution is language independent and represents a significant enhancement. This solution not only facilitates automatic scoring but plays an important role in clustering students' responses;…