This is the official repository for "Closing the Loop: Learning to Generate Writing Feedback via Language Model Simulated Student Revisions", which was accepted to the proceedings of EMNLP, 2024. This work proposes a novel technique for optimize models in generating effective feedback.
Please cite our paper, if you found this repo useful for your project:
@inproceedings{nair-etal-2024-closing,
title = "Closing the Loop: Learning to Generate Writing Feedback via Language Model Simulated Student Revisions",
author = "Nair, Inderjeet Jayakumar and
Tan, Jiaye and
Su, Xiaotian and
Gere, Anne and
Wang, Xu and
Wang, Lu",
editor = "Al-Onaizan, Yaser and
Bansal, Mohit and
Chen, Yun-Nung",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = nov,
year = "2024",
address = "Miami, Florida, USA",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.928/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.928",
pages = "16636--16657",
abstract = "Providing feedback is widely recognized as crucial for refining students' writing skills. Recent advances in language models (LMs) have made it possible to automatically generate feedback that is actionable and well-aligned with human-specified attributes. However, it remains unclear whether the feedback generated by these models is truly effective in enhancing the quality of student revisions. Moreover, prompting LMs with a precise set of instructions to generate feedback is nontrivial due to the lack of consensus regarding the specific attributes that can lead to improved revising performance. To address these challenges, we propose PROF that PROduces Feedback via learning from LM simulated student revisions. PROF aims to iteratively optimize the feedback generator by directly maximizing the effectiveness of students' overall revising performance as simulated by LMs. Focusing on an economic essay assignment, we empirically test the efficacy of PROF and observe that our approach not only surpasses a variety of baseline methods in effectiveness of improving students' writing but also demonstrates enhanced pedagogical values, even though it was not explicitly trained for this aspect."
}