Recently, the emerging technologies have been constantly shaping the education domain, especially the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for language learning, which has attracted significant attention. Many of the AI tools are being used for learning foreign languages, in both formal and informal ways. There are many studies that have explored the potential of the recent technology “ChatGPT” for education and learning languages, but none of the existing studies have conducted any exploratory study for assessing the usability of ChatGPT. This paper conducts an assessment for usability of ChatGPT for formal English language learning. The study uses a standard questionnaire-based approach to ask participants about their feedback for usefulness and effectiveness of ChatGPT. The participants were asked for their feedback after performing series of tasks related to formal English language learning with ChatGPT. A variety of student participants were selected for this study with diverse English language proficiency levels, education levels, and nationalities. The quantitative analysis of the participant responses shed light on their experience with regards to the usability of ChatGPT for performing different English language learning tasks such as conversation, writing, grammar, and vocabulary. The findings from this study are quite promising and indicate that ChatGPT is an effective tool to be used for formal English language learning. Overall, this study contributes to the fast-growing research domain on using emerging technologies for formal English language learning by conducting in-depth assessment of usability for ChatGPT in formal English language learning.

At present, emerging technologies, such as machine learning, deep learning, or various forms of artificial intelligence are penetrating different fields of education, including foreign language education (FLE). Moreover, the current young generation was born into the technological environment, and they perceive technologies as being an indispensable part of their everyday life. However, they mainly use technologies in their informal learning, but there is not much research into emerging technologies in FLE, namely in teaching and learning English as an applied language. Therefore, the purpose of this systematic review is to identify, bring together, compare and analyze all of the technologies that are currently efficiently employed in foreign language teaching and learning, and based on the findings of the detected experimental studies, we provide specific pedagogical implications on how to use these technologies in the acquisition of English as an applied language at the university level. The methodology followed the PRISMA guidelines for systematic reviews and meta-analyses. The results of the detected experimental studies revealed that there was a serious lack of the latest technologies, such as chatbots or virtual reality (VR) devices, that are being empirically employed in a foreign language (FL) education. Moreover, mobile apps are merely focused on the development of FL vocabulary. The findings also indicate that although the FL teachers might theoretically know about these latest technological devices, such as neural machine translation, they do not know how to practically implement them in their teaching process. Therefore, this research suggests that teachers must be trained and pedagogically guided on how to purposefully implement them in their FL classes to support traditional instruction in order to identify what skills or language structures could be developed through their use. In addition, it is also claimed that more experimental studies are needed to clearly the evidence and its usefulness in teaching a foreign language as an applied language.

Bloom’s taxonomy is a popular model to classify educational learning objectives into different learning levels for three domains including cognitive, affective and psycho motor. Each domain is further detailed into different levels. The cognitive domain includes knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation levels. In educational institutions, designing course learning outcomes (CLOs) as per different levels of Bloom and mapping of assessment items on designed CLOs is an important task — every semester, faculty and administrators read thousands of statements to complete the tedious task of such mapping of CLOs and assessment items into Bloom’s levels for an improved student learning. This paper proposes LSTM based deep learning model to perform classification of CLOs and assessment items in different levels of Bloom in cognitive domain. Although, there has been some attempts in the literature to automatically assign Bloom’s taxonomy category using keywords-based approach but it suffers from the problem of low accuracy and overlapping of keywords. Initially, when we performed keywords-based approach on our datasets we achieved an overall accuracy of 55% for classification of CLOs and assessment items into Bloom’s taxonomy. The proposed model predicts Bloom’s level for CLO and assessment question item, respectively. The proposed model is simple in terms of the architecture as compared to other deep learning models reported in literature and achieves classification accuracy of 87% and 74% on CLOs and assessment question items, respectively. The proposed model obtained 3% increase in overall accuracy comparing to an existing study for the same task. To the best of our knowledge, this is first attempt towards applying deep learning on classifying educational objectives in Bloom’s levels.

In recent years, online shopping has surged in popularity, with customer reviews becoming a crucial aspect of the decision-making process. Reviews not only help potential customers make informed choices, but also provide businesses with valuable feedback and build trust. In this study, we conducted a thorough analysis of the Amazon reviews dataset, which includes several product categories. Our primary objective was to accurately classify sentiments using natural language processing, machine learning, ensemble learning, and deep learning techniques. Our research workflow encompassed several crucial steps. We explore data collection procedures; preprocessing steps, including normalization and tokenization; and feature extraction, utilizing the Bag-of-Words and TF–IDF methods. We conducted experiments employing a variety of machine learning algorithms, including Multinomial Naive Bayes, Random Forest, Decision Tree, and Logistic Regression. Additionally, we harnessed Bagging as an ensemble learning technique. Furthermore, we explored deep learning-based algorithms, such as CNNs, Bidirectional LSTM, and transformer-based models, like XLNet and BERT. Our comprehensive evaluations, utilizing metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score, revealed that the BERT algorithm outperformed others, achieving an impressive accuracy rate of 89%. This research provides valuable insights into the sentiment analysis of Amazon reviews, aiding both consumers and businesses in making informed decisions and enhancing product and service quality.

Sentiment analysis is essential for comprehending public opinion, particularly when considering e-commerce and the expansion of online businesses. Early approaches treated sentiment analysis as a document or sentence-level classification problem, lacking the ability to capture nuanced opinions about specific aspects. This limitation was addressed by the development of aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA), which links sentiment to specific aspects that are mentioned explicitly or implicitly in the review. ABSA is relatively a recent field of sentiment analysis and the existing models for ABSA face three main challenges, including domain-specificity, reliance on labeled data, and a lack of exploration into the potential of newer large language models (LLMs) such as GPT, PaLM, and T5. Leveraging a diverse set of datasets, including DOTSA, MAMS, and SemEval16, we evaluate the performance of prominent models such as ATAE-LSTM, flan-t5-large-absa, DeBERTa, PaLM, and GPT-3.5-Turbo. Our findings reveal nuanced strengths and weaknesses of these models across different domains, with DeBERTa emerging as consistently high-performing and PaLM demonstrating remarkable competitiveness for aspect term sentiment analysis (ATSA) tasks. In addition, the PaLM demonstrates competitive performance for all the domains that were used in the experiments including the restaurant, hotel, books, clothing, and laptop reviews. Notably, the analysis underscores the models’ domain sensitivity, shedding light on their varying efficacy for both ATSA and ACSA tasks. These insights contribute to a deeper understanding of model applicability and highlight potential areas for improvement in ABSA research and development.

Data imbalance is a frequently occurring problem in classification tasks where the number of samples in one category exceeds the amount in others. Quite often, the minority class data is of great importance representing concepts of interest and is often challenging to obtain in real-life scenarios and applications. Imagine a customers’ dataset for bank loans-majority of the instances belong to non-defaulter class, only a small number of customers would be labeled as defaulters, however, the performance accuracy is more important on defaulters labels than non-defaulter in such highly imbalance datasets. Lack of enough data samples across all the class labels results in data imbalance causing poor classification performance while training the model. Synthetic data generation and oversampling techniques such as SMOTE, AdaSyn can address this issue for statistical data, yet such methods suffer from overfitting and substantial noise. While such techniques have proved useful for synthetic numerical and image data generation using GANs, the effectiveness of approaches proposed for textual data, which can retain grammatical structure, context, and semantic information, has yet to be evaluated. In this paper, we address this issue by assessing text sequence generation algorithms coupled with grammatical validation on domain-specific highly imbalanced datasets for text classification. We exploit recently proposed GPT-2 and LSTM-based text generation models to introduce balance in highly imbalanced text datasets. The experiments presented in this paper on three highly imbalanced datasets from different domains show that the performance of same deep neural network models improve up to $17\%$ when datasets are balanced using generated text.