CEFR Level Assessment across Languages and Text Granularities

Abstract

Automatic assessment of textual CEFR levels is an important task in educational natural language processing. However, accurate CEFR level prediction remains challenging due to the naturally imbalanced distribution of CEFR levels and the ambiguous boundaries between adjacent levels. To address these challenges, we propose a unified training objective that combines focal loss with supervised contrastive learning. Focal loss mitigates class imbalance by emphasizing underrepresented and difficult examples, while supervised contrastive learning learns more discriminative representations by encouraging intra-class compactness and inter-class separation. We evaluate the proposed method on sentence- and document-level CEFR assessment in both monolingual and multilingual settings. Experimental results demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms strong baselines across all settings, establishing new state-of-the-art performance on multiple CEFR assessment benchmarks.