AI Can’t Cut It: Correcting Language Learners’ Writing Still Has to Be Done by Hand

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Kraut
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AI Can’t Cut It: Correcting Language Learners’ Writing Still Has to Be Done by Hand

Postby Kraut » Mon Jan 16, 2023 3:35 pm

AI Can’t Cut It: Correcting Language Learners’ Writing Still Has to Be Done by Hand


https://www.goethe.de/en/spr/mag/zuk/24347140.html

Many providers of AI writing assistants promise “high-quality writing at the push of a button”. Proofreading and editing software is now capable of instantly correcting reams of text and providing suggested improvements. But how good are these AI editors, and do they help foreign language learners learn to write well themselves?

By Dr. Moritz Dittmeyer


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Recently developed language models have been breaking one record after another, and these network architectures are indeed astoundingly good at “understanding”, manipulating, and imitating natural language. One of the most famous language models is Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) created by the US research lab OpenAI.

However, they’d need to be adapted extensivelyfor use in correcting and improving texts written by language learners. Usable comprehensive language models already exist primarily for English. So one common practice for correcting German texts is to translate them into English first, improve them in English and then translate them back into German. The problem is that the text is sometimes noticeably distorted after going through the various steps involved, and often contains words, expressions, and grammatical structures that are not yet familiar to language learners.

What’s more, language models are trained to produce ideal or standard language and are unable to allow for different levels of language proficiency for didactic purposes. As a result, they propose corrections and improvements that often make no sense for lower-level learners, for whom other factors besides ideal usage need to be taken into account.
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