A generative AI writing tutor that produces personalized feedback for English learners

 Generative AI tools—artificial intelligence models that can generate images, text, videos, or other content in a short amount of time—have become increasingly popular recently, especially after the public release of ChatGPT. ChatGPT, a popular chatbot from OpenAI, is now used by countless users around the world to get information and even create creative writing or academic essays.

The use of ChatGPT by students is already causing considerable debate, as it could lead to students being graded on assignments they did not work on and potentially even unfairly failing classes they did not study for. A team of researchers at Columbia University recently developed Scraft, an artificial intelligence-based generative system that can support student learning instead of helping them cheat on their assignments.

Introduced in a paper previously published on arXiv, this AI-based tool can generate useful grammar feedback on English writing tasks. Scraft could be particularly useful for international students who are trying to improve their English writing skills, helping them to spot the mistakes they often make and understand how to correct them.

"We naturally came to this idea as an ESL student who grew up struggling with writing and as a current ESL writing teacher interacting with other ESL students," Tyler Kim, one of the researchers who conducted the study, told Tech Xplore. "We realized that writing feedback is difficult, expensive and [time-consuming] to provide, which prevents students from becoming better writers. This is a serious problem in Korea, where English, despite being a second language, is essential to educational prospects and employment. , because more than half of the job offers require knowledge of English."

Scraft, an AI-based generative system created by researchers, was designed to offer useful feedback based on the Socratic method of questioning. Socratic questioning, named after the Greek philosopher Socrates, is a well-known approach for creating insightful questions that stimulate thought and learning.

“Scraft is an AI writing tutor for English learners that provides real-time personalized writing feedback and targeted writing exercises that reveal individual students' writing weaknesses,” explained Kim. "It uses generative artificial intelligence to understand the context of writing, provide feedback and prompt questions to encourage critical thinking that supports language acquisition."

Kim and his colleagues have already built a working prototype of Scraft and evaluated it in a preliminary study involving 15 university students. These students were asked to use the AI-based tool for two weeks while working on a written assignment and then share their thoughts and feedback during 15-minute interviews.

The students interviewed said that they found Scraft very useful and that it helped them improve their English writing skills. They were particularly pleased with the insightful questions he elicited, saying they pinpointed mistakes or aspects of their writing they were unaware of.

"We were able to use generative AI to create educational feedback, rather than the most intuitive use case: text/essay generation," Kim said. "As students, we realized that using an AI text generator was basically mindlessly watching the AI ​​generate content that didn't help us become better writers. We wanted to use the same technology in an educational way that would help us become better writers instead of just creating we write better."

The researchers plan to release a public beta version of Scraft in early June 2023 and hope it will help many English learners around the world improve their writing skills. In the meantime, they will be conducting further studies to further evaluate and improve their AI writing tool.