The 5th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications NAACL-HLT 2010 Workshops

Post-Workshop Information

We would like to thank the authors, our program committee, and workshop attendees for helping put together the 5th NAACL-BEA Workshop. In addition, individual papers and slides, as well as the opening remark slides, can be downloaded from the Workshop Program section below. The papers can also be found in the 2010 Workshop section of the ACL anthology.

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 open-ended 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. From a somewhat different angle, NLP techniques are also being used to generate assessments and tools for curriculum development as well as tools to support assessment development. As a community we are improving existing capabilities, and identifying and generating innovative ways to use NLP in applications for writing, reading, speaking, critical thinking, and assessment development.

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, 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. Last year's workshop (NAACL/HLT 2009) was a banner year with a record number of submissions and attendees. The 2010 workshop (consistent with previous workshops at ACL 1997, NAACL/HLT 2003, ACL 2005, ACL 2008, and NAACL/HLT 2009) will continue to expose the NLP research community to these technologies with the hope that they will continue to identify novel opportunities for the use of NLP techniques and tools in educational applications.

The workshop will include a demo session for accepted papers that involve a system.

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 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

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 2010 NAACL-HLT style sheet for composing your paper: http://naaclhlt2010.isi.edu/authors.html

We will be using the START conference system to manage submissions: https://www.softconf.com/naaclhlt2010/education/

Important Dates

• Submission Deadline: March 01, 2010
• Notification of Acceptance: March 30, 2010
• Camera-ready papers Due: April 12, 2010
• Workshop: June 05, 2010

Program Committee

• Delphine Bernhard, LIMSI-CNRS, France
• Jared Bernstein, Pearson, USA
• Martin Chodorow, Hunter College, CUNY, USA
• Barbara Di Eugenio, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
• Markus Dickinson, Indiana University, USA
• Bill Dolan, Microsoft, USA
• Maxine Eskenazi, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
• Peter Foltz, Pearson, USA
• Jennifer Foster, Dublin City University, Ireland
• Annette Frank, University of Heidelberg, Germany
• Michael Gamon, Microsoft, USA
• Caroline Gasperin, University of Sao Paolo, Brazil
• 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, NICT, Japan
• Pamela Jordan, University of Pittsburgh, USA
• Ola Knutsson, KTH Nada, Sweden
• John Lee, City University of Hong Kong, China
• Diane Litman, University of Pittsburgh, USA
• Detmar Meurers, University of Tubingen, Germany
• Lisa Michaud, Saint Anselm College, USA
• Ani Nenkova, University of Pennsylvania, USA
• Mari Ostendorf, University of Washington, USA
• Ted Pedersen, University of Minnesota, USA
• Mihai Rotaru, TextKernel, the Netherlands
• Dan Roth, UIUC, USA
• Mathias Schulze, University of Waterloo, Canada
• Stephanie Seneff, MIT, USA
• Richard Sproat, Oregon Graduate Institute, USA
• Jana Sukkarieh, ETS, USA
• Svetlana Stoyanchev, Open University, UK
• Nai-Lung Tsao, National Central University, Taiwan
• Pete Whitelock, Oxford University Press, UK
• David Wible, National Central University, Taiwan
• Magdalena Wolska, Saarbruken University, Germany

Related Links

• NAACL 2010
• 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)

Upcoming Conferences

• NAACL Wkshp on Computational Linguistics and Writing: Writing Processes and Authoring Aids (CL&W 2010)
• Intelligent Tutoring Systens (ITS)
• SLaTE 2010