The 6th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications ACL-HLT 2011 Workshops

Workshop Description

Research in NLP applications for education continues to progress using innovative NLP techniques - statistical, rule-based, or most commonly, a combination of the two. New technologies have made it possible to include speech in both assessment and Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS). NLP techniques are also being used to generate assessments and tools for curriculum development of reading materials, as well as tools to support assessment and test development. As a community we continue to improve existing capabilities and to identify and generate innovative and creative ways to use NLP in applications for writing, reading, speaking, critical thinking, and assessment.

NLP-based educational applications continue to develop in order to serve the learning and assessment needs of students, teachers, schools, and testing organizations. Contributions to the educational problem space include: development of curriculum and assessment (e.g., applications that help teachers develop reading materials), delivery of curriculum and assessments (e.g., applications where the student receives instruction and interacts with the system), and reporting of assessment outcomes (e.g., automated essay scoring). The need for, and the rapid development of, language-based capabilities have been driven by increased requirements for state and national assessments, and a growing population of foreign and second language learners.

In the past ten years, the 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. The workshops on the "Innovative Use of NLP in Building Educational Applications" have continued to bring together all these subfields to foster interaction and collaboration among researchers in both academic institutions and industry. This workshop offers a venue for researchers to present and discuss work in this area. Each year, workshop submission numbers and attendance grows, and the state of the research becomes more innovative and advanced. In the past two years, at NAACL/HLT 2009 and 2010, the workshop received a record number of submissions and attendees. The 2011 workshop (consistent with previous workshops at ACL 1997, NAACL/HLT 2003, ACL 2005, ACL 2008, NAACL/HLT 2009, and NAACL/HLT 2010) will continue to expose the NLP research community to these technologies as they continue to identify novel opportunities for the use of NLP techniques and tools in educational applications.

The workshop will solicit both full papers (8 pages plus 2 pages for references) and short papers (4 pages plus 2 pages for references) for either oral or poster presentation. We will give special attention to research that has taken into serious consideration the educational problem space into which their work fits. Topics will include, but will not be limited to, the following:

• Automated scoring/evaluation for oral and written student responses
  • Content analysis for scoring/assessment
  • Grammatical error detection and correction
  • Discourse and stylistic analysis
  • Plagiarism detection
  • Machine Translation for assessment, instruction and curriculum development
  
  
  
• Intelligent Tutoring (IT) that incorporates state-of-the-art NLP methods
  • Dialogue systems in education
  • Hypothesis formation and testing
  • Multi-modal communication between students and computers
  • Generation of tutorial responses
  • Knowledge representation in learning systems
  • Concept visualization in learning systems
  
  
  
• Learner cognition
  • Assessment of learners' language and cognitive skill levels
  • Systems that detect and adapt to learners' cognitive or emotional states
  • Tools for learners with special needs
  
  
  
• Use of corpora in educational tools
  • Data mining of learner and other corpora for tool building
  • Annotation standards and schemas / annotator agreement
  
  
  
• Tools for classroom teachers and/or test developers
  • NLP tools for second and foreign language learners
  • Semantic-based access to instructional materials to identify appropriate texts
  • Tools that automatically generate test questions - such as multiple choice or short answer
  • Processing of and access to lecture materials across topics and genres
  • Adaptation of instructional text to individual learners' grade levels
  • Tools for text-based curriculum development
  • E-learning tools for personalized course content
  • Language-based educational games
  
  
  
• Issues concerning the evaluation of NLP-based educational tools
  
  
• Descriptions of implemented systems

Workshop Program

Submission Information

We will be using the ACL-HLT 2011 Submission Guidelines for the BEA-6 Workshop this year. Authors are invited to submit a full paper of up to 8 pages in electronic, PDF format (with up to 2 additional pages for references). This year, we also invite short papers of up to 4 pages (including 2 additional pages for references). Papers which describe systems are also invited to give a demo of their system. If you would like to present a demo in addition to presenting the paper, please make sure to select either "full paper + demo" or "short paper + demo" in the START submission process.

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 2011 ACL-HLT style sheet for composing your paper: http://www.acl2011.org/call.shtml#submission

We will be using the START conference system to manage submissions: https://www.softconf.com/acl2011/education/

Important Dates

• Submission Deadline: April 01, 2011
• Notification of Acceptance: April 26, 2011
• Camera-ready papers Due: May 04, 2011
• Workshop: June 24, 2011

Program Committee

• Delphine Bernhard, LIMSI-CNRS, France
• Jared Bernstein, Pearson, USA
• Chris Brockett, MSR, USA
• Lei Chen, ETS, USA
• Martin Chodorow, Hunter College, CUNY, USA
• Mark Core, Institute for Creative Technologies
• Barbara Di Eugenio, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
• Markus Dickinson, Indiana University, USA
• Bill Dolan, Microsoft, USA
• Maxine Eskenazi, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
• Keelan Evanini, ETS, USA
• Peter Foltz, Pearson Knowledge Technologies, USA
• Jennifer Foster, Dublin City University, Ireland
• Horacio Franco, SRI, USA
• Michael Gamon, Microsoft, USA
• Caroline Gasperin, TouchType Ltd., UK
• Kallirroi Georgila, Institute for Creative Technologies
• Iryna Gurevych, University of Darmstadt, Germany
• Na-Rae Han, University of Pittsburgh, USA
• Trude Heift, Simon Frasier University, Canada
• Derrick Higgins, ETS, USA
• Emi Izumi, Kyoto University of Foreign Studies, Japan
• Heng Ji, Queens College, USA
• Pamela Jordan, University of Pittsburgh, USA
• Ola Knutsson, KTH Nada, Sweden
• John Lee, City University of Kong, USA
• Jackson Liscombe, SpeechCycle, Inc., USA
• Diane Litman, University of Pittsburgh, USA
• Annie Louis, University of Pennsylvania,
• Nitin Madnani, ETS, USA
• Montse Maritxalar, University of the Basque Country, Spain
• James Martin, University of Colorado
• Aurélien Max, LIMSI-CNRS, France
• Detmar Meurers, University of Tübingen, Germany
• Lisa Michaud, Merrimack College, USA
• Rada Mihalcea, University of North Texas
• Michael Mohler, University of North Texas
• Jack Mostow, CMU, USA
• Smaranda Muresan, Rutgers University, USA
• Ani Nenkova, University of Pennsylvania, USA
• Mari Ostendorf, University of Washington, USA
• Ted Pedersen, University of Minnesota, USA
• Patti Price, PPRICE Speech and Language Technology, USA
• Andrew Rosenberg, Queens College, CUNY, USA
• Mihai Rotaru, TextKernel, the Netherlands
• Dan Roth, UIUC, USA
• Alla Rozovskaya, UIUC, USA
• Mathias Schulze, University of Waterloo, Canada
• Stephanie Seneff, MIT, USA
• Izhak Shafran, Oregon Health & Science University, USA
• Jana Sukkarieh, ETS, USA
• Svetlana Stenchikova, Open University, UK
• Helmer Strik, Radboug University Nijmegen, the Netherlands
• Joseph Tepperman, Rosetta Stone, USA
• Nai-Lung Tsao, National Central University, Taiwan
• Monica Ward, Dublin City University, Ireland
• Pete Whitelock, Oxford University Press, UK
• David Wible, National Central University, Taiwan
• Klaus Zechner, ETS, USA

Related Links

• ACL-HLT 2011
• First Workshop on Building Educational Applications Using NLP (2003)
• Second Workshop on Building Educational Applications Using NLP (2005)
• Third Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (2008)
• Fourth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (2009)
• Fifth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (2010)

• 2011 CALICO Wkshp on Automatic Analysis of Learner Language (AALL III)