Margarita Alonso, linguist: "We can teach students to use ChatGPT as a financial aid tool for the essay".

Concern for the writing problems of university students led Margarita Alonso, a linguist and professor at the University of A Coruña, and a group of researchers to design theHARTA tool tool for financial aid to the essay of academic texts), which they tested and improved during the pandemic. With it, they help students to write better academic texts using as a basis two academic corpus, of experts and novices: the first one, formed by scientific articles of all fields, and the second one, by TFG and TFM.

This was one of the projects that the researcher recently presented at the international congress 'Corpus de aprendices y corpus académicos en español y en francés', organized by the group 'Public discourse' group of the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra. She also shared other resources derived from the compilation of academic corpora and presented the methodology used to evaluate the written production of high school diploma and university students.

"By comparing the two corpora, and basing ourselves on the experts' corpus as a quality criterion, we obtained some combinations to use in academic texts," Alonso explains. In this way they were able to create this tool that collects "recurrent lexical combinations" such as, for example, it is necessary to point out, it seems reasonable to suggest or the results show. "We include these academic formulas and assign them a discursive function. For example, to emphasize or emphasize, we can use cabe destacar, no debemos olvidar, etc.," he notes.

Artificial intelligence and teaching

Currently, they are working on the analysis of a linguistic corpus of pre-university students with the goal of obtaining linguistic quality criteria. These are characterized, in the words of the expert, by "a series of lexical, syntactic and discursive features that can be defined as constructs of a potential academic writing test".

To achieve this, they are conducting a "thoroughassessment " in two ways: humans and artificial intelligence systems. "One of the challenges of our research is, therefore, to establish a correlation between the result the human evaluator, the quantifiable linguistic features and the result the AI-based evaluator," the linguist stresses.

"There are different tools based on artificial intelligence (AI), such as ChatGPT, that make writing much easier, but students don't know how to take advantage of them and limit themselves to copying what the system generates. However, teachers should help them discover how AI can facilitate and improve their essay process," he says. He also points out that "a tool like HARTA can coexist with ChatGPT, but their functions are very different: the former is a financial aid for specific lexical issues of academic speech , while the latter can function as a dictionary that can be asked questions". In this sense, he points out the core topic role that teachers also play: "AI is a challenge for everyone and the teacher must help the student to learn. And we must not forget the importance of knowing how to write in order to develop cognitive skills that help the student to organize his or her ideas.