Explainable AI in Language Learning: Linking Empirical Evidence and Theoretical Concepts in Proficiency and Readability Modeling of Portuguese

Luisa Ribeiro-Flucht, Xiaobin Chen, Detmar Meurers

Abstract
While machine learning methods have supported significantly improved results in education research, a common deficiency lies in the explainability of the result. Explainable AI (XAI) aims to fill that gap by providing transparent, conceptually understandable explanations for the classification decisions, enhancing human comprehension and trust in the outcomes. This paper explores an XAI approach to proficiency and readability assessment employing a comprehensive set of 465 linguistic complexity measures. We identify theoretical descriptions associating such measures with varying levels of proficiency and readability and validate them using cross-corpus experiments employing supervised machine learning and Shapley Additive Explanations. The results not only highlight the utility of a diverse set of complexity measures in effectively modeling proficiency and readability in Portuguese, achieving a state-of-the-art accuracy of 0.70 in the proficiency classification task and of 0.84 in the readability classification task, but they largely corroborate the theoretical research assumptions, especially in the lexical domain.
Anthology ID:
2024.bea-1.17
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2024)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Ekaterina Kochmar, Marie Bexte, Jill Burstein, Andrea Horbach, Ronja Laarmann-Quante, Anaïs Tack, Victoria Yaneva, Zheng Yuan
Venue:
BEA
SIG:
SIGEDU
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
199–209
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.bea-1.17
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Luisa Ribeiro-Flucht, Xiaobin Chen, and Detmar Meurers. 2024. Explainable AI in Language Learning: Linking Empirical Evidence and Theoretical Concepts in Proficiency and Readability Modeling of Portuguese. In Proceedings of the 19th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2024), pages 199–209, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Explainable AI in Language Learning: Linking Empirical Evidence and Theoretical Concepts in Proficiency and Readability Modeling of Portuguese (Ribeiro-Flucht et al., BEA 2024)
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