The 4th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications NAACL-HLT 2009 Workshops

Workshop Description

NLP-based applications in educational environments continue to develop at a fast pace. Initial work began as early as the 1960’s on evaluating written essay-length and short-answer assessments, text-based intelligent tutoring systems (ITS), and proofreading tools. These fields continue to progress using innovative NLP techniques – statistical, rule-based, or some combination of the two. More recently, new technologies have made it possible to include speech in both assessment and ITS. Using a somewhat different approach, NLP techniques are being used to generate assessments and tools for curriculum development. As a community we are not only improving existing capabilities, but identifying and generating innovative and creative ways to use NLP in applications for writing, reading, speaking, and critical thinking.

The need for, and the rapid development of, language-based capability development has been driven by increased requirements for state/national assessments and a growing population of foreign and second language learners. In the past ten 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.

The Innovative Use of NLP in Educational Applications workshops have continued to bring together all these subfields 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, ACL 2005 and ACL 2008) 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 techniques and tools in educational applications.

We are increasing the scope of this workshop to include the following:

• A demo session for accepted papers that involve a system.
• Preliminary planning session for the first shared task of the workshop: grammatical error detection of articles and prepositions for 2010.

Full paper and short paper 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 incorporate 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
  • Assist in text-based curriculum development
  • E-learning tools for personalized course content
  • Language-based educational games
  
  
• Issues involving the shared tasks for the 2010 Workshop: Grammatical error detection and correction
  
  
• Issues concerning the evaluation of NLP-based educational tools
  
  
• Descriptions of implemented systems

Workshop Program

[ Download Proceedings ]

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). This year, we also invite short papers of up to 4 pages (including 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 2009 NAACL-HLT style sheet for composing your paper: http://clear.colorado.edu/NAACLHLT2009/stylefiles.html

We will be using the START conference system to manage submissions: https://www.softconf.com/naacl-hlt09/EducationNLP2009/

Important Dates

• Submission Deadline: March 13, 2009 (DEADLINE EXTENDED)
• Notification of Acceptance: April 06, 2009
• Camera-ready papers Due: April 13, 2009
• Workshop: June 05, 2009

Program Committee

• Martin Chodorow, Hunter College, CUNY, USA
• Bill Dolan, Microsoft, USA
• Jennifer Foster, Dublin City University, Ireland
• Michael Gamon, Microsoft, USA
• Maxine Eskenazi, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
• Na-Rae Han, Korea University, Korea
• Trude Heift, Simon Frasier University, Canada
• Derrick Higgins, ETS, USA
• Emi Izumi, NICT, Japan
• Ola Knutsson, KTH Nada, Sweden
• John Lee, MIT, USA
• Diane Litman, University of Pittsburgh, USA
• Detmar Meurers, University of Tubingen, Germany
• Lisa Michaud, Saint Anselm College, USA
• Ani Nenkova, University of Pennsylvania, USA
• Ted Pedersen, University of Minnesota, USA
• Mihai Rotaru, TextKernel, the Netherlands
• Mathias Schulze, University of Waterloo, Canada
• Stephanie Seneff, MIT, USA
• Richard Sproat, Oregon Graduate Institute, USA
• Jana Sukkarieh, ETS, USA
• Svetlana Stenchikova, Stony Brook University, USA
• David Wible, National Central University, Taiwan

Related Links

• NAACL 2009
• 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)