Generative artificial intelligence in EFL writing: A pedagogical stance of pre-service teachers and teacher trainers

This study examines pre-service English language teachers’ grounds and connections between the use of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools in EFL writing skills and future prospects to integrate them into their teaching practices. Employing a qualitative research paradigm, a researcher-developed survey was used to elicit the perspectives of 28 pre-service English language teachers and 10 teacher trainers. The stages of qualitative data analysis were followed, emergent ideas embedded in the responses were labeled and the codes were clustered into broader themes to obtain a description of their reflections. This study documented reflections on the transformative impact of generative AI in EFL writing. Benefits were reported considering the use of AI tools to overcome writer’s block and get language support, and instantaneous and personalized feedback to the texts. Foregrounding concerns regarding academic misconduct, a need was highlighted for ethical guidelines and enhancement to AI literacy to ensure the validity of AI-generated content. Further, they suggested reformulating assessment and evaluation in EFL writing skills and moving away from result-oriented exams suggesting the adoption of performance-based and process-oriented assessments. Accordingly, ethical and pedagogical implications were offered to adopt a critical stance to improve AI literacy skills in EFL writing development

AI in academic writing: Assessing current usage and future implications

Artificial intelligence (AI) integration in academic writing has gained significant attention due to its potential impact on authorship, the natural character of academic works, and ethical considerations. This Study aims to assess the faculty members' perceptions on their current usage of AI in academic writing and explore its future implications. The research involved an online survey administered to 68 faculty members responding to closed and open-ended questions. The study revealed faculty members' perceptions of AI integration in academic writing and its implications for authorship and the authenticity of academic work. Findings reveal widespread adoption of AI tools among faculty members, offering efficiency, productivity, and accuracy benefits in areas like grammar checks, reference management, writing assistance, and plagiarism detection. However, concerns arise over authorship preservation and maintaining academic work's unique character, emphasizing the need for clear guidelines. Ethical considerations and best practices are also highlighted to use AI while safeguarding academic integrity effectively. These insights extend to educators, policy makers, and researchers, offering a comprehensive view of AI's current role in academic writing and guiding ethical discussions and best practices. Ultimately, this research enhances teaching and learning practices in Indonesian higher education institutions through responsible AI integration

Plagiarism Detection Techniques for Arabic Script Languages: A Literature Review

Plagiarism is generally defined as literary theft and academic dishonesty. This considered as the serious issue in an academic documents and texts. There are numerous of plagiarism detection techniques have been developed for various natural languages, mainly English. In this paper we investigate and review the plagiarism detection techniques and algorithms which have been developed for Arabic Script Languages (ASL), and providing a literature review of the utilized methods in terms of techniques and outcomes.  The result of this paper will help the researchers who are going to commence their development and extend their researches in ASL like Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and Kurdish

Plagiarism detection for Indonesian texts

As plagiarism becomes an increasing concern for Indonesian universities and research centers, the need of using automatic plagiarism checker is becoming more real. However, researches on Plagiarism Detection Systems (PDS) in Indonesian documents have not been well developed, since most of them deal with detecting duplicate or near-duplicate documents, have not addressed the problem of retrieving source documents, or show tendency to measure document similarity globally. Therefore, systems resulted from these researches are incapable of referring to exact locations of ``similar passage'' pairs. Besides, there has been no public and standard corpora available to evaluate PDS in Indonesian texts. To address the weaknesses of former researches, this thesis develops a plagiarism detection system which executes various methods of plagiarism detection stages in a workflow system. In retrieval stage, a novel document feature coined as phraseword is introduced and executed along with word unigram and character n-grams to address the problem of retrieving source documents, whose contents are copied partially or obfuscated in a suspicious document. The detection stage, which exploits a two-step paragraph-based comparison, is aimed to address the problems of detecting and locating source-obfuscated passage pairs. The seeds for matching source-obfuscated passage pairs are based on locally-weighted significant terms to capture paraphrased and summarized passages. In addition to this system, an evaluation corpus was created through simulation by human writers, and by algorithmic random generation. Using this corpus, the performance evaluation of the proposed methods was performed in three scenarios. On the first scenario which evaluated source retrieval performance, some methods using phraseword and token features were able to achieve the optimum recall rate 1. On the second scenario which evaluated detection performance, our system was compared to Alvi's algorithm and evaluated in 4 levels of measures: character, passage, document, and cases. The experiment results showed that methods resulted from using token as seeds have higher scores than Alvi's algorithm in all 4 levels of measures both in artificial and simulated plagiarism cases. In case detection, our systems outperform Alvi's algorithm in recognizing copied, shaked, and paraphrased passages. However, Alvi's recognition rate on summarized passage is insignificantly higher than our system. The same tendency of experiment results were demonstrated on the third experiment scenario, only the precision rates of Alvi's algorithm in character and paragraph levels are higher than our system. The higher Plagdet scores produced by some methods in our system than Alvi's scores show that this study has fulfilled its objective in implementing a competitive state-of-the-art algorithm for detecting plagiarism in Indonesian texts. Being run at our test document corpus, Alvi's highest scores of recall, precision, Plagdet, and detection rate on no-plagiarism cases correspond to its scores when it was tested on PAN'14 corpus. Thus, this study has contributed in creating a standard evaluation corpus for assessing PDS for Indonesian documents. Besides, this study contributes in a source retrieval algorithm which introduces phrasewords as document features, and a paragraph-based text alignment algorithm which relies on two different strategies. One of them is to apply local-word weighting used in text summarization field to select seeds for both discriminating paragraph pair candidates and matching process. The proposed detection algorithm results in almost no multiple detection. This contributes to the strength of this algorithm

Authorship Verification

In recent years, stylometry, the study of linguistic style, has become more prominent in security and privacy applications involving written language, mostly in digital and online domains. Although literature is abundant with computational stylometry research, the field of authorship verification is relatively unexplored. Authorship verification is the binary semi-open-world problem of determining whether a document is written by a given author or not. A key component in authorship verification techniques is confidence measurement, on which verification decisions are based, expressed by acceptance thresholds selected and tuned per need. This thesis demonstrates how utilization of confidence-based approaches in stylometric applications, and their combination with traditional approaches, can benefit classification accuracy, and allow new domains and problems to be analyzed. We start by motivating the usage of authorship verification approaches with two stylometric applications: native-language identification from non-native text and active linguistic user authentication. Next, we introduce the Classify-Verify algorithm, which integrates classification with binary verification, applied to several stylometric problems. Classify-Verify is proposed as an open-world alternative to restricted closed-world attribution methods, and is shown effective in dealing with possibly missing candidate authors by thwarting misclassifications, coping with various domains and scales, and even adversarial authors who try to fool the classifier.Ph.D., Computer Science -- Drexel University, 201

Plagiarism in high schools: A case study of how teachers address a perpetual dilemma

This was a multiple case study of all the 12th grade English teachers in one West Virginia county school system. Qualitative data collection methods involving teacher interviews and analysis of classroom handouts were utilized to reveal how they address plagiarism. Demographic statistics about the communities and schools was examined to enable comparisons between the schools and the participants. The research questions guiding this study were: (a) What are secondary English teachers\u27 perspectives on plagiarism, and (b) What are secondary English teachers\u27 practices on plagiarism. Data were collected and analyzed for any patterns, extremes, or relevancy to the related literature. Then significant quotes were copied and pasted from interview transcripts into tables containing plagiarism related topics. Document data were also coded and examined for a relationship to interview data. Data revealed that English teachers of students in advanced classes and students in schools with a higher socioeconomic status felt their students plagiarized less and for more honorable reasons than did teachers of students in regular education classes located in more rural, less well-off communities. The data revealed English teachers spent a great deal of time, most of one grading period, six or seven weeks, for instruction of the research project. Data indicated most English teachers enforced either an oral or written policy on plagiarism that usually includes a grade cut as the sole consequence. The opportunities for students to plagiarize and for teachers to detect plagiarism continued to evolve as their use of technology evolved. English teachers can help prevent plagiarism by insuring their instruction on research and writing is meaningful and comprehended by their students. All English teachers can help prevent plagiarism in any instance by having a communicated policy to deal with instances of plagiarism that involves discipline beyond simply the expected grade cut

Technologies for Reusing Text from the Web

Texts from the web can be reused individually or in large quantities. The former is called text reuse and the latter language reuse. We first present a comprehensive overview of the different ways in which text and language is reused today, and how exactly information retrieval technologies can be applied in this respect. The remainder of the thesis then deals with specific retrieval tasks. In general, our contributions consist of models and algorithms, their evaluation, and for that purpose, large-scale corpus construction. The thesis divides into two parts. The first part introduces technologies for text reuse detection, and our contributions are as follows: (1) A unified view of projecting-based and embedding-based fingerprinting for near-duplicate detection and the first time evaluation of fingerprint algorithms on Wikipedia revision histories as a new, large-scale corpus of near-duplicates. (2) A new retrieval model for the quantification of cross-language text similarity, which gets by without parallel corpora. We have evaluated the model in comparison to other models on many different pairs of languages. (3) An evaluation framework for text reuse and particularly plagiarism detectors, which consists of tailored detection performance measures and a large-scale corpus of automatically generated and manually written plagiarism cases. The latter have been obtained via crowdsourcing. This framework has been successfully applied to evaluate many different state-of-the-art plagiarism detection approaches within three international evaluation competitions. The second part introduces technologies that solve three retrieval tasks based on language reuse, and our contributions are as follows: (4) A new model for the comparison of textual and non-textual web items across media, which exploits web comments as a source of information about the topic of an item. In this connection, we identify web comments as a largely neglected information source and introduce the rationale of comment retrieval. (5) Two new algorithms for query segmentation, which exploit web n-grams and Wikipedia as a means of discerning the user intent of a keyword query. Moreover, we crowdsource a new corpus for the evaluation of query segmentation which surpasses existing corpora by two orders of magnitude. (6) A new writing assistance tool called Netspeak, which is a search engine for commonly used language. Netspeak indexes the web in the form of web n-grams as a source of writing examples and implements a wildcard query processor on top of it.Texte aus dem Web können einzeln oder in großen Mengen wiederverwendet werden. Ersteres wird Textwiederverwendung und letzteres Sprachwiederverwendung genannt. Zunächst geben wir einen ausführlichen Überblick darüber, auf welche Weise Text und Sprache heutzutage wiederverwendet und wie Technologien des Information Retrieval in diesem Zusammenhang angewendet werden können. In der übrigen Arbeit werden dann spezifische Retrievalaufgaben behandelt. Unsere Beiträge bestehen dabei aus Modellen und Algorithmen, ihrer empirischen Auswertung und der Konstruktion von großen Korpora hierfür. Die Dissertation ist in zwei Teile gegliedert. Im ersten Teil präsentieren wir Technologien zur Erkennung von Textwiederverwendungen und leisten folgende Beiträge: (1) Ein Überblick über projektionsbasierte- und einbettungsbasierte Fingerprinting-Verfahren für die Erkennung nahezu identischer Texte, sowie die erstmalige Evaluierung einer Reihe solcher Verfahren auf den Revisionshistorien der Wikipedia. (2) Ein neues Modell zum sprachübergreifenden, inhaltlichen Vergleich von Texten. Das Modell basiert auf einem mehrsprachigen Korpus bestehend aus Pärchen themenverwandter Texte, wie zum Beispiel der Wikipedia. Wir vergleichen das Modell in mehreren Sprachen mit herkömmlichen Modellen. (3) Eine Evaluierungsumgebung für Algorithmen zur Plagiaterkennung. Die Umgebung besteht aus Maßen, die die Güte der Erkennung eines Algorithmus' quantifizieren, und einem großen Korpus von Plagiaten. Die Plagiate wurden automatisch generiert sowie mit Hilfe von Crowdsourcing manuell erstellt. Darüber hinaus haben wir zwei Workshops veranstaltet, in denen unsere Evaluierungsumgebung erfolgreich zur Evaluierung aktueller Plagiaterkennungsalgorithmen eingesetzt wurde. Im zweiten Teil präsentieren wir auf Sprachwiederverwendung basierende Technologien für drei verschiedene Retrievalaufgaben und leisten folgende Beiträge: (4) Ein neues Modell zum medienübergreifenden, inhaltlichen Vergleich von Objekten aus dem Web. Das Modell basiert auf der Auswertung der zu einem Objekt vorliegenden Kommentare. In diesem Zusammenhang identifizieren wir Webkommentare als eine in der Forschung bislang vernachlässigte Informationsquelle und stellen die Grundlagen des Kommentarretrievals vor. (5) Zwei neue Algorithmen zur Segmentierung von Websuchanfragen. Die Algorithmen nutzen Web n-Gramme sowie Wikipedia, um die Intention des Suchenden in einer Suchanfrage festzustellen. Darüber hinaus haben wir mittels Crowdsourcing ein neues Evaluierungskorpus erstellt, das zwei Größenordnungen größer ist als bisherige Korpora. (6) Eine neuartige Suchmaschine, genannt Netspeak, die die Suche nach gebräuchlicher Sprache ermöglicht. Netspeak indiziert das Web als Quelle für gebräuchliche Sprache in der Form von n-Grammen und implementiert eine Wildcardsuche darauf

Using ChatGPT and other LLMs in Professional Environments

Large language models like ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and Microsoft’s new Bing, to name a few, are developing rapidly in recent years, becoming very popular in different environments, and supporting a wide range of tasks. A deep look into their outcomes reveals several limitations and challenges that can be further improved. The main challenge of these models is the possibility of generating biased or inaccurate results, since these models rely on large amounts of data with no access to unpublic information. Moreover, these language models need to be properly monitored and trained to prevent generating inappropriate or offensive content and to ensure that they are used ethically and safely. This study investigates the use of ChatGPT and other large language models such as Blender, and BERT in professional environments. It has been found that none of the large language models, including ChatGPT, have been used in unstructured dialogues. Moreover, involving the models in professional environments requires extensive training and monitoring by domain professionals or fine-tuning through API