Closing the Loop: Learning to Generate Writing Feedback via Language Model Simulated Student Revisions

Understand

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.