Imperial, Joesph Marvin, Barayan, Abdullah, Stodden, Regina, Wilkens, Rodrigo, Muñoz Sánchez, Ricardo, Gao, Lingyun, Torgbi, Melisa, Knight, Dawn  ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4745-6502, Forey, Gail, Jablonkai, Reka R., Kochmar, Ekaterina, Reynolds, Robert, Ribeiro, Eugénio, Saggion, Horacio, Volodina, Elena, Vajjala, Sowmya, François, Thomas, Alva-Manchego, Fernando and Madabushi, Harish Tayyar
2025.
UniversalCEFR: Enabling open multilingual research on language proficiency assessment.
Presented at: Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2025),
Suzhou, China,
4-11 November 2025.
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.
Association for Computational Linguistics,
pp. 9703-9755.
10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.491
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Abstract
We introduce UniversalCEFR, a large-scale multilingual multidimensional dataset of texts annotated according to the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference) scale in 13 languages. To enable open research in both automated readability and language proficiency assessment, UniversalCEFR comprises 505,807 CEFR-labeled texts curated from educational and learner-oriented resources, standardized into a unified data format to support consistent processing, analysis, and modeling across tasks and languages. To demonstrate its utility, we conduct benchmark experiments using three modelling paradigms: a) linguistic feature-based classification, b) fine-tuning pre-trained LLMs, and c) descriptor-based prompting of instruction-tuned LLMs. Our results further support using linguistic features and fine-tuning pretrained models in multilingual CEFR level assessment. Overall, UniversalCEFR aims to establish best practices in data distribution in language proficiency research by standardising dataset formats and promoting their accessibility to the global research community.
| Item Type: | Conference or Workshop Item - published (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Date Type: | Published Online |
| Status: | Published |
| Schools: | Schools > English, Communication and Philosophy Schools > Computer Science & Informatics |
| Publisher: | Association for Computational Linguistics |
| ISBN: | 9798891763326 |
| Date of First Compliant Deposit: | 10 September 2025 |
| Last Modified: | 06 Feb 2026 14:53 |
| URI: | https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/180928 |
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