The 3rd Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications ACL 2008 Workshops

Post-Workshop Information

We would like to thank the authors, our program committee, and workshop attendees for helping put together the 3rd ACL-BEA Workshop. Final proceedings of the 3rd ACL-BEA Workshop can be downloaded here: [ proceedings ]. In addition, individual papers and slides can be downloaded from the Workshop Program section below. The papers can also be found in the 2008 Workshop section of the ACL anthology.

Workshop Description

NLP-based applications have had a profound effect on education in the areas of assessment and instruction. Early applications focused on writing for automated essay scoring, short-answer response scoring in assessment and intelligent tutoring, and grammatical error detection for proofreading. More recently, NLP has been introduced into additional educational contexts, including automated scoring of speech and text-based curriculum development for reading support. In addition, the earlier applications for grammatical error detection have greatly improved. Not only has the field improved existing capabilities, but as a community we are generating innovative and creative ways to use NLP in applications for multiple skill sets, including writing, reading, and speaking.

The need for, and the rapid development of, language-based capability development in the United States and other Anglophone countries are driven by increased requirements for state/national assessments and a growing population of English language learners. In the past five years, steady growth in the area of NLP-based applications for education has prompted an increased number of workshops which typically focus on one specific aspect of NLP-based educational applications. In this workshop, we solicit papers from all subfields.

We intend to bring all subfields together to foster continued interaction and collaboration among researchers in both academic institutions and industry. This workshop (consistent with previous workshops at ACL 1997, NAACL/HLT 2003, and ACL 2005) will continue to expose the NLP research community to these technologies with the hope that they continue to identify novel opportunities for the use of NLP tools in educational applications.

For this workshop, we invite submissions including, but not limited to:

• Automated Scoring/Evaluation for Text and Speech
  • Automated processing of spoken and written lecture materials across genres, e.g., - Content-based analysis - Grammatical error detection - Response-based discourse analysis - Stylistic analysis
  • Knowledge representation in learning systems
  • Machine translation for assessment, instruction, and curriculum development
  • Plagiarism detection tools
• Intelligent Tutoring
  • Intelligent tutoring systems that incorporate state-of-the-art NLP methods to evaluate response content, using either text- or speech-based analyses
  • Dialogue systems in education
  • Hypothesis formation and testing in automated tutoring systems
  • Multi-modal communication between human learners and machines
  • Automatically generating tutorial responses
• Learner Cognition
  • Automated assessment of students' language and cognitive skill levels
  • Automated systems that detect and adapt to learners' cognitive or emotional states
  • Automatic generation of test questions
  • Tools for learners with special needs
• Corpora and annotation standards for building NLP educational tools
• Use of Response Databases
  • Data mining of student corpora for tool building
  • Visualization of concepts in learning systems
• Classroom Tools
  • NLP tools for second language learners
  • Semantic-based access to instructional materials
  • Tools for teachers and test developers (such as tools that automatically identify text on a given topic, or adapt a text to the grade level of the student, or assist in text-based curriculum development)
  • E-learning tools for personalized course content
• Evaluation of NLP-based tools for education
• Description of Working Systems

Workshop Program (List of Accepted Papers)

Submission Information

Authors are invited to submit a full paper of up to 8 pages in electronic, PDF format (with up to 1 additional page for references). Previously published papers cannot be accepted. The submissions will be reviewed by the program committee. As reviewing will be blind, please ensure that papers are anonymous. Self-references that reveal the author's identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...", should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...".

Please use the ACL style sheet for composing your paper: http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/acl08/stylefiles.html

And the following submission page handled by the START conference system: https://www.softconf.com/acl08/ACL08-WS10/

Important Dates

• Submission deadline: March 21, 2008
• Notification of acceptance: April 10, 2008
• Final papers due: April 21, 2008
• Workshop: June 19, 2008

Program Committee

• Martin Chodorow, Hunter College, CUNY, USA
• Mark Core, ICT/USC, USA
• Bill Dolan, Microsoft, USA
• Jennifer Foster, Dublin City University, Ireland
• Michael Gamon, Microsoft, USA
• Na-Rae Han, Korea University, Korea
• Derrick Higgins, ETS, USA
• Emi Izumi, NICT, Japan
• Ola Knutsson, KTH Nada, Sweden
• Claudia Leacock, Butler Hill Group, USA
• John Lee, MIT, USA
• Kathy McCoy, University of Delaware, USA
• Detmar Meurers, OSU, USA
• Lisa Michaud, Wheaton College, USA
• Mari Ostendorf, University of Washington, USA
• Stephen Pulman, Oxford, UK
• Mathias Schulze, University of Waterloo, Canada
• Stephanie Seneff, MIT, USA
• Richard Sproat, UIUC, USA
• Jana Sukkarieh, ETS, USA

Related Links

• ACL 2008
• First Workshop on Building Educational Applications Using NLP (2003)
• Second ACL Workshop on Building Educational Applications Using NLP (2005)