Comparing human and LLM proofreading in L2 writing: Impact on lexical and syntactic features

Hakyung Sung, Karla Csuros, Min-Chang Sung


Abstract
This study examines the lexical and syntactic interventions of human and LLM proofreading aimed at improving overall intelligibility in identical second language writings, and evaluates the consistency of outcomes across three LLMs (ChatGPT-4o, Llama3.1-8b, Deepseek-r1-8b). Findings show that both human and LLM proofreading enhance bigram lexical features, which may contribute to better coherence and contextual connectedness between adjacent words. However, LLM proofreading exhibits a more generative approach, extensively reworking vocabulary and sentence structures, such as employing more diverse and sophisticated vocabulary and incorporating a greater number of adjective modifiers in noun phrases. The proofreading outcomes are highly consistent in major lexical and syntactic features across the three models.
Anthology ID:
2025.bea-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 20th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2025)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Ekaterina Kochmar, Bashar Alhafni, Marie Bexte, Jill Burstein, Andrea Horbach, Ronja Laarmann-Quante, Anaïs Tack, Victoria Yaneva, Zheng Yuan
Venues:
BEA | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11–23
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/acl25-workshop-ingestion/2025.bea-1.2/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hakyung Sung, Karla Csuros, and Min-Chang Sung. 2025. Comparing human and LLM proofreading in L2 writing: Impact on lexical and syntactic features. In Proceedings of the 20th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2025), pages 11–23, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Comparing human and LLM proofreading in L2 writing: Impact on lexical and syntactic features (Sung et al., BEA 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/acl25-workshop-ingestion/2025.bea-1.2.pdf