BEA-2020 Paper

Our paper ‘Tracking the Evolution of Written Language Competence in L2 Spanish Learners’ (with Sam Davidson, Dominique Brunato, Felice Dell’Orletta, Kenji Sagae, Claudia Helena Sanchez-Gutierrez and Giulia Venturi) has been accepted at BEA-2020! In this paper we presented an NLP-based approach for tracking the evolution of written language competence in L2 Spanish learners using a wide range of linguistic features automatically extracted from students’ written productions. Beyond reporting classification results for different scenarios, we explored the connection between the most predictive features and the teaching curriculum, finding that our set of linguistic features often reflects the explicit instruction that students receive during each course.