Reka R. Jablonkai
2025
UniversalCEFR: Enabling Open Multilingual Research on Language Proficiency Assessment
Joseph Marvin Imperial
|
Abdullah Barayan
|
Regina Stodden
|
Rodrigo Wilkens
|
Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez
|
Lingyun Gao
|
Melissa Torgbi
|
Dawn Knight
|
Gail Forey
|
Reka R. Jablonkai
|
Ekaterina Kochmar
|
Robert Joshua Reynolds
|
Eugénio Ribeiro
|
Horacio Saggion
|
Elena Volodina
|
Sowmya Vajjala
|
Thomas François
|
Fernando Alva-Manchego
|
Harish Tayyar Madabushi
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
We introduce UniversalCEFR, a large-scale multilingual multidimensional dataset of texts annotated according to the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference) scale in 13 languages. To enable open research in both automated readability and language proficiency assessment, UniversalCEFR comprises 505,807 CEFR-labeled texts curated from educational and learner-oriented resources, standardized into a unified data format to support consistent processing, analysis, and modeling across tasks and languages. To demonstrate its utility, we conduct benchmark experiments using three modelling paradigms: a) linguistic feature-based classification, b) fine-tuning pre-trained LLMs, and c) descriptor-based prompting of instruction-tuned LLMs. Our results further support using linguistic features and fine-tuning pretrained models in multilingual CEFR level assessment. Overall, UniversalCEFR aims to establish best practices in data distribution in language proficiency research by standardising dataset formats and promoting their accessibility to the global research community.
Search
Fix author
Co-authors
- Fernando Alva-Manchego 1
- Abdullah Barayan 1
- Gail Forey 1
- Thomas François 1
- Lingyun Gao 1
- show all...