13 citations · 20 across the 17 of their papers we have counts for
18 papers
Data Augmentation for L2 English Speaking Assessment using TTS
Stefano Bannò, Penny Karanasou, Mengjie Qian +2
Automated assessment of second language (L2) speaking proficiency requires substantial annotated speech data, which are scarce compared to written learner corpora. We investigate w…
Towards Self-Referential Analytic Assessment: A Profile-Based Approach to L2 Writing Evaluation with LLMs
Stefano Bannò, Kate Knill, Mark Gales
Automated essay scoring (AES) research often relies on rank-based correlation metrics to validate analytic assessment. However, such metrics obscure both intrinsic intercorrelation…
Exploiting the English Grammar Profile for L2 grammatical analysis with LLMs
Stefano Bannò, Penny Karanasou, Kate Knill +1
Evaluating the grammatical competence of second language (L2) learners is essential both for providing targeted feedback and for assessing proficiency. To achieve this, we propose…
Data Augmentation for Spoken Grammatical Error Correction
Penny Karanasou, Mengjie Qian, Stefano Bannò +2
While there exist strong benchmark datasets for grammatical error correction (GEC), high-quality annotated spoken datasets for Spoken GEC (SGEC) are still under-resourced. In this…
Natural Language-based Assessment of L2 Oral Proficiency using LLMs
Stefano Bannò, Rao Ma, Mengjie Qian +3
Natural language-based assessment (NLA) is an approach to second language assessment that uses instructions - expressed in the form of can-do descriptors - originally intended for…
Opportunities and Challenges of LLMs in Education: An NLP Perspective
Sowmya Vajjala, Bashar Alhafni, Stefano Bannò +2
Interest in the role of large language models (LLMs) in education is increasing, considering the new opportunities they offer for teaching, learning, and assessment. In this paper,…
End-to-End Spoken Grammatical Error Correction
Mengjie Qian, Rao Ma, Stefano Bannò +2
Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) and feedback play a vital role in supporting second language (L2) learners, educators, and examiners. While written GEC is well-established, spok…
Exploiting the English Vocabulary Profile for L2 word-level vocabulary assessment with LLMs
Stefano Bannò, Kate Knill, Mark Gales
Vocabulary use is a fundamental aspect of second language (L2) proficiency. To date, its assessment by automated systems has typically examined the context-independent, or part-of-…
Assessment of L2 Oral Proficiency using Speech Large Language Models
Rao Ma, Mengjie Qian, Siyuan Tang +3
The growing population of L2 English speakers has increased the demand for developing automatic graders for spoken language assessment (SLA). Historically, statistical models, text…
Scaling and Prompting for Improved End-to-End Spoken Grammatical Error Correction
Mengjie Qian, Rao Ma, Stefano Bannò +2
Spoken Grammatical Error Correction (SGEC) and Feedback (SGECF) are crucial for second language learners, teachers and test takers. Traditional SGEC systems rely on a cascaded pipe…
Speak & Improve Challenge 2025: Tasks and Baseline Systems
Mengjie Qian, Kate Knill, Stefano Banno +4
This paper presents the "Speak & Improve Challenge 2025: Spoken Language Assessment and Feedback" -- a challenge associated with the ISCA SLaTE 2025 Workshop. The goal of the chall…
LLMs in Education: Novel Perspectives, Challenges, and Opportunities
Bashar Alhafni, Sowmya Vajjala, Stefano Bannò +2
The role of large language models (LLMs) in education is an increasing area of interest today, considering the new opportunities they offer for teaching, learning, and assessment.…
Grammatical Error Feedback: An Implicit Evaluation Approach
Stefano Bannò, Kate Knill, Mark J. F. Gales
Grammatical feedback is crucial for consolidating second language (L2) learning. Most research in computer-assisted language learning has focused on feedback through grammatical er…
Can GPT-4 do L2 analytic assessment?
Stefano Bannò, Hari Krishna Vydana, Kate M. Knill +1
Automated essay scoring (AES) to evaluate second language (L2) proficiency has been a firmly established technology used in educational contexts for decades. Although holistic scor…
Towards End-to-End Spoken Grammatical Error Correction
Stefano Bannò, Rao Ma, Mengjie Qian +2
Grammatical feedback is crucial for L2 learners, teachers, and testers. Spoken grammatical error correction (GEC) aims to supply feedback to L2 learners on their use of grammar whe…
L2 proficiency assessment using self-supervised speech representations
Stefano Bannò, Kate M. Knill, Marco Matassoni +2
There has been a growing demand for automated spoken language assessment systems in recent years. A standard pipeline for this process is to start with a speech recognition system…
Proficiency assessment of L2 spoken English using wav2vec 2.0
Stefano Bannò, Marco Matassoni
The increasing demand for learning English as a second language has led to a growing interest in methods for automatically assessing spoken language proficiency. Most approaches us…
TLT-school: a Corpus of Non Native Children Speech
Roberto Gretter, Marco Matassoni, Stefano Bannò +1
This paper describes "TLT-school" a corpus of speech utterances collected in schools of northern Italy for assessing the performance of students learning both English and German. T…