The 7th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications NAACL-HLT 2012 Workshops

Post-Workshop Information

We would like to thank the authors, our program committee, and workshop attendees for helping put together the 7th 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 complete proceedings can also be found in the ACL Anthology.

For those attending the workshop, we will once again have our world famous post-workshop dinner! Please join us at Restaurant Kashmir at 7:00 (Thursday, June 07). Please email Joel before noon Thursday so he can get a headcount to make reservations. Directions to the workshop can be found here. It is a nice, 30 minute walk. We will meet in the first floor lobby at 6:15 to walk over.

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. As a community we are continuing to improve existing capabilities and to identify and generate innovative ways to use NLP in applications for writing, reading, speaking, critical thinking, curriculum development, and assessment. Steady growth in the development of NLP-based applications for education has prompted an increased number of workshops, typically focusing on one specific subfield.

In this workshop, we solicit papers from all subfields: automated scoring, intelligent tutoring, learner cognition, use of corpora, grammatical error detection, and tools for teachers and test developers. Since the first workshop in 1997, "Innovative Use of NLP in Building Educational Applications" has continued to bring together all NLP subfields to foster interaction and collaboration among researchers in both academic institutions and industry. The workshop offers a venue for researchers to present and discuss their work in these areas. Each year, we see steady growth in workshop submissions and attendance, and the research has become more innovative and advanced. In 2012, we expect that the workshop (consistent with previous workshops at ACL 1997, NAACL/HLT 2003, ACL 2005, ACL 2008, NAACL/HLT 2009, NAACL/HLT 2010, and ACL 2011), will continue to expose the NLP research community to technologies that identify novel opportunities for the use of NLP techniques and tools in educational applications. At ACL 2011, the workshop introduced a poster session that was lively and well-attended. We plan to continue to have poster sessions as a regular feature.

The practical need for language-analysis capabilities has been driven by increased requirements for state and national assessments, and a growing population of foreign and second language learners. There are currently a number of commercial systems that handle automated scoring of free-text and speech in the context of assessment as well as systems that address linguistic complexity in text - commonly referred to as readability measures. More recently, the need for applications for language analysis is emphasized by a new influence in the educational landscape in the United States, specifically, the Common Core State Standards initiative: (http://www.corestandards.org/) that is coordinated by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers. The initiative has now been adopted by 46 states for use in Kindergarten through 12th grade (K-12) classrooms. This initiative is likely to have a strong influence on teaching standards in K-12 education. The Common Core standards describe what K-12 students should be learning with regard to Reading, Writing, Speaking, Listening, Language, and Media and Technology. In addition, the Common Core recently released a Publishers Criteria document that describes the array of linguistic elements that learners need to grasp as they progress to the higher grades (http://www.corestandards.org/assets/Publishers_Criteria_for_3-12.pdf). The Common Core thereby introduces language analysis scenarios that have clear alignments with NLP research and applications.

The workshop will solicit both full papers and short papers for either oral or poster presentation. This year, the Helping Our Own (HOO-2) Shared Task on grammatical error detection will be co-located with the BEA7 workshop.

Given the broad scope of the workshop, we organize the workshop around three central themes in the educational infrastructure:

1. Development of curriculum and assessment (e.g., applications that help teachers develop reading materials)
2. Delivery of curriculum and assessments (e.g., applications where the student receives instruction and interacts with the system);
3. Deporting of assessment outcomes (e.g., automated scoring of free responses)

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
  • Detection of non-literal language (e.g., metaphor)
  • Sentiment analysis
  
  
  
• 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 and applications 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
  • 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
  
  
• Descriptions and proposals for shared tasks

HOO-2012 Shared Task

We are pleased to announce that the second edition of the "Helping Our Own" Shared Task on grammatical error detection will be co-located with BEA7 this year. The Shared Task will be organized independently from the BEA7. System description papers submitted and accepted to the HOO Shared Task will be presented as posters at the BEA Poster Session. In addition, the HOO organizers will summarize the results of the Shared Task in an oral presentation during the BEA. For more information on the task, as well as important dates and submission information, please go to: http://www.correcttext.org/hoo2012.

Workshop Program

Submission Information

We will be using the NAACL-HLT 2012 Submission Guidelines for the BEA-7 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. We also invite short papers of up to 4 pages, including 2 additional pages for references. Please note that the short paper guidelines (4 + 2) differ from the NAACL main conference guidelines (4 pages total). 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" under "Submission Category" in the START submission page.

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 2012 NAACL-HLT style sheet for composing your paper: http://www.naaclhlt2012.org/conference/conference.php

We will be using the START conference system to manage submissions: https://www.softconf.com/naaclhlt2012/BEA2012/

Please note that we are using the same submission page for both the BEA7 (deadline April 04 at 23:59 EST) and the HOO-2012 Shared Task (paper deadline May 04). When submitting to the HOO2012, please select "HOO2012" under "Submission Category."

Important Dates

• Submission Deadline: April 04
• Notification of Acceptance: April 23
• Camera-ready papers Due: May 04
• Workshop: June 07, 2012

Program Committee

• Andrea Abel, EURAC, Italy
• Shane Bergsma, Johns Hopkins University, USA
• Delphine Bernhard, Université de Strasbourg, France
• Jared Bernstein, Pearson, USA
• Daniel Blanchard, Educational Testing Service, USA
• Kristy Boyer, North Carolina State University, USA
• Chris Brew, Educational Testing Service, USA
• Chris Brockett, Microsoft Research, USA
• Aoife Cahill, Educational Testing Service, USA
• Martin Chodorow, Hunter College of CUNY, USA
• Mark Core, USC Institute for Creative Technologies, USA
• Daniel Dahlmeier, National University of Singapore, Singapore
• Markus Dickinson, Indiana University, USA
• Robert Dale, Macquarie University, Australia
• Bill Dolan, Microsoft Research, USA
• Maxine Eskenazi, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
• Keelan Evanini, Educational Testing Service, USA
• Jennifer Foster, Dublin City University, Ireland
• Annette Frank, University of Heidelberg, Germany
• Michael Gamon, Microsoft Research, USA
• Caroline Gasperin, TouchType, Brazil
• Kallirroi Georgila, USC Institute for Creative Technologies, USA
• Iryna Gurevych, University of Darmstadt, Germany
• Na-Rae Han, University of Pittsburgh, USA
• Trude Heift, Simon Frasier University, Canada
• Michael Heilman, Educational Testing Service, USA
• Derrick Higgins, Educational Testing Service, USA
• Heng Ji, Queens College of CUNY, USA
• Pamela Jordan, University of Pittsburgh, USA
• Ola Knutsson, Stockholm University, Sweden
• John Lee, City University of Hong Kong, China
• Xiaofei Lu, Penn State University, USA
• Roger Levy, University of California San Diego, USA
• Jackson Liscombe, SpeechCycle, USA
• Diane Litman, University of Pittsburgh, USA
• Annie Louis, University of Pennsylvania, USA
• Nitin Madnani, Educational Testing Service, USA
• Montse Maritxalar, University of the Basque Country, Spain
• Aurélien Max, LIMSI-CNRS, France
• Detmar Meurers, University of Tübingen, Germany
• Lisa Michaud, Merrimack College, USA
• Rada Mihalcea, University of North Texas, USA
• Michael Mohler, University of North Texas, USA
• Jack Mostow, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
• Smaranda Muresan, Rutgers University, USA
• Ani Nenkova, University of Pennsylvania, USA
• Rodney Nielsen, University of Colorado, USA
• Hwee Tou Ng, National University of Singapore, USA
• Matt Post, Johns Hopkins University, USA
• Patti Price, PPRICE Speech and Language Technology, USA
• Andrew Rosenberg, Queens College of CUNY, USA
• Mihai Rotaru, TextKernel, the Netherlands
• Dan Roth, University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne, USA
• Alla Rozovskaya, University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne, USA
• Mathias Schulze, University of Waterloo, Canada
• Stephanie Seneff, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
• Izhak Shafran, Oregon Health & Science University, USA
• Serge Sharoff, University of Leeds, UK
• Svetlana Stenchikova, Open University, UK
• Helmer Strik, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands
• Joseph Tepperman, Rosetta Stone, USA
• Nai-Lung Tsao, National Central University, Taiwan
• Benjamin Van Durme, Johns Hopkins University, USA
• Arthur Ward, University of Pittsburgh, USA
• Monica Ward, Dublin City University, Ireland
• David Wible, National Central University, Taiwan
• Sze Wong, Macquarie University, Australia
• Peter Wood, University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada
• Klaus Zechner, Educational Testing Service, USA

Related Links

• NAACL-HLT 2012
• 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)
• Sixth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (2011)

Other Upcoming Educational/NLP Conferences

• Helping Our Own 2012 Shared Task (June 07, 2012; Montreal)
• International Symposium on Automatic Detection of Errors in Pronunciation Training (June 06-08, 2012; Stockholm, Sweden)
• Intelligent Tutoring Systems (June 14-18, 2012; Chania, Crete)
• Educational Data Mining (June 19-21, 2012; Chania, Crete)
• Question Generation Workshop (TBA)