The 8th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications

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.

In 2012, the use of NLP in educational contexts took two major steps forward. First, outside of the computational linguistics community, the Hewlett Foundation reached out to both the public and private sectors and sponsored two competitions: one on automated essay scoring (Automated Student Assessment Prize: ASAP, Phase 1), and a second on short-answer scoring (Phase 2). The motivation driving these competitions was to engage the larger scientific community in this enterprise. The two competitions were inspired by the Common Core State Initiative, an influential set of standards adopted by 45 states in the U.S. The Initiative describes what K-12 students should be learning with regard to Reading, Writing, Speaking, Listening, and Media and Technology. Another breakthrough for educational applications within the computational linguistics community was the second edition of the “Helping Our Own” grammatical error detection/correction competition at last year’s BEA workshop – where 14 systems competed. In 2013, independent of the BEA workshop, there will be two shared task competitions. This year’s CoNLL Shared Task is on grammatical error correction and there is a SemEval Shared Task on Student Response Analysis. Both of these competitions will increase the visibility of the educational problem space in the NLP community.

In this year’s BEA workshop, we are soliciting papers across a broad range of educational applications, including: intelligent tutoring, learner cognition, use of corpora, grammatical error detection, tools for teachers and test developers, and automated scoring and evaluation of open-ended responses. 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 2013, 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, ACL 2011, NAACL HLT 2012), 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 NAACL HLT 2012, the workshop coordinated with the HOO shared task for grammatical error detection, generating a much larger poster session that was lively and well-attended. In 2013, the workshop will host a Native Language Identification Shared Task.

The workshop will solicit both full papers and short papers for either oral or poster presentation. 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. Reporting of assessment outcomes (e.g., automated scoring of open-ended 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
  • Analysis of the structure of argumentation
  • 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
  

NLI-2013 Shared Task

We are pleased to host the first edition of a shared task on Native Language Identification (NLI). The shared task will be organized by Joel Tetreault, Aoife Cahill and Daniel Blanchard. NLI is the task of identifying the native language (L1) of a writer based solely on a sample of their writing. The task is typically framed as a classification problem where the set of L1s is known a priori. Most work has focused on identifying the native language of writers learning English as a second language. To date this topic has motivated several ACL and EMNLP papers, as well as a master’s thesis.

Native Language Identification (NLI) can be useful for a number of applications. In educational settings, NLI can be used to provide more targeted feedback to language learners about their errors. It is well known that learners of different languages make different errors depending on their L1s. A writing tutor system which can detect the native language of the learner will be able to tailor the feedback about the error and contrast it with common properties of the learner’s language. In addition, native language is often used as a feature that goes into authorship profiling, which is frequently used in forensic linguistics. Details on the shared task can be found on the website: http://www.nlisharedtask2013.org/.

Submission Information

We will be using the NAACL-HLT 2013 Submission Guidelines for the BEA-8 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. 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 2013 NAACL-HLT style sheet for composing your paper: http://naacl2013.naacl.org/CFP.aspx (see Format section for style files).

We will be using the START conference system to manage submissions: https://www.softconf.com/naacl2013/BEA8/

Please note that we are using the same submission page for both the BEA-8 and the NLI-2013 Shared Task. When submitting to the NLI-2013, please select "NLI 2013 Shared Task" under "Submission Type."

Important Dates

• Submission Deadline: March 11 - 23:59 EST (New York City Time) [ Current EST ]
• Notification of Acceptance: March 29
• Camera-ready papers Due: April 12
• Workshop: June 13

Presentation Information

Oral Presentations: Long papers accepted for oral presentations are allotted 20 minutes for the talk and 5 minutes for questions. Short papers that are accepted for oral presentations are allotted 15 minutes for the talk and 5 minutes for questions.

Poster Presentations: All papers accepted for a poster presentation (this includes NLI Shared Task papers) will be presented in the session after lunch. We will divide the poster session so that people presenting posters will have a chance to see other posters and don't have to be at their poster the entire time.

The posterboards will be 3 ft high and 4 ft wide, slightly bending about 10 in in at both left and right ends. They will be set on top of 4-5 ft long, 18 in deep tables so there will be room to also hold handouts, business cards, computer, etc. There will also be one chair will be at each table. Double-sided tape, pushpins, etc. for affixing the posters to the boards will be provided.

Workshop Program

Program Committee

• Andrea Abel, EURAC, Italy
• Sumit Basu, Microsoft Research, USA
• Lee Becker, Avaya Labs, USA
• Beata Beigman Klebanov, Educational Testing Service, USA
• Delphine Bernhard, Université de Strasbourg, France
• Jared Bernstein, Pearson, USA
• Kristy Boyer, North Carolina State University, USA
• Chris Brew, Educational Testing Service, USA
• Ted Briscoe, University of Cambridge, UK
• Chris Brockett, MSR, USA
• Aoife Cahill, Educational Testing Service, USA
• Martin Chodorow, Hunter College, CUNY, USA
• Mark Core, USC Institute for Creative Technologies, USA
• Daniel Dahlmeier, National University of Singapore, Singapore
• Markus Dickinson, Indiana University, USA
• Bill Dolan, Microsoft, USA
• Myrosia Dzikovska, University of Edinburgh, UK
• Keelan Evanini, Educational Testing Service, USA
• Michael Flor, Educational Testing Service, USA
• Peter Foltz, Pearson Knowledge Technologies, USA
• Jennifer Foster, Dublin City University, Ireland
• Horacio Franco, SRI, USA
• Michael Gamon, Microsoft, USA
• Caroline Gasperin, SwiftKey, UK
• Kallirroi Georgila, USC Institute for Creative Technologies, USA
• Iryna Gurevych, University of Darmstadt, Germany
• Kadri Hacioglu, Rosetta Stone, USA
• 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
• Ross Israel, Indiana University, USA
• Heng Ji, Queens College, USA
• Pamela Jordan, University of Pittsburgh, USA
• Ola Knutsson, Stockholm University, Sweden
• Mamoru Komachi, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
• John Lee, City University of Hong Kong, China
• Jackson Liscombe, Nuance Communications, USA
• Diane Litman, University of Pittsburgh, USA
• Annie Louis, University of Pennsylvania, USA
• Xiaofei Lu, Penn State University, USA
• Nitin Madnani, Educational Testing Service, USA
• Montse Maritxalar, University of the Basque Country, Spain
• James Martin, University of Colorado, USA
• Aurélien Max, LIMSI-CNRS, France
• Detmar Meurers, University of Tübingen, Germany
• Lisa Michaud, Merrimack College, USA
• Michael Mohler, University of North Texas
• Smaranda Muresan, Rutgers University, USA
• Ani Nenkova, University of Pennsylvania, USA
• Hwee Tou Ng, National University of Singapore, Singapore
• Rodney Nielsen, University of North Texas, USA
• Ted Pedersen, University of Minnesota, USA
• Bryan Pellom, Rosetta Stone, USA
• Heather Pon-Barry, Arizona State University, 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
• Izhak Shafran, Oregon Health & Science University, USA
• Serge Sharoff, University of Leeds, UK
• Richard Sproat, Google, USA
• Svetlana Stenchikova, Columbia University, USA
• Helmer Strik, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands
• Joseph Tepperman, Rosetta Stone, USA
• Nai-Lung Tsao, National Central University, Taiwan
• Elena Volodina, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
• Monica Ward, Dublin City University, Ireland
• Pete Whitelock, Oxford University Press, UK
• David Wible, National Central University, Taiwan
• Peter Wood, University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada
• Klaus Zechner, Educational Testing Service, USA
• Torsten Zesch, University of Darmstadt, Germany

Related Links

• NAACL-HLT 2013
• 1st Workshop on Building Educational Applications Using NLP (2003)
• 2nd Workshop on Building Educational Applications Using NLP (2005)
• 3rd Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (2008)
• 4th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (2009)
• 5th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (2010)
• 6th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (2011)
• 7th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (2012)

Other Upcoming Educational/NLP Conferences

• 2nd Workshop on NLP for Computer-assisted Language Learning (Oslo, Norway; May 22, 2013)
• ICALL in the Digital Age: Leveraging Natural Language Processing in an Increasingly Connected Learning Environment (Honolulu, Hawaii, USA; May 22, 2013)
• Native Language Identification Shared Task (Atlanta, USA; June 13, 2013)
• NAACL Wkshp on NLP for Improving Textual Accessibility (NLP4ITA) (Atlanta, USA; June 14, 2013)
• SEMEVAL Joint Student Response Analysis and 8th Recognizing Textual Entailment Challenge (Atlanta, USA; June 14, 2013)
• AI in Education (AIED 2013) (Memphis, USA; July 09-13, 2013)
• CoNLL Shared Task on Grammatical Error Correction (Sofia, Bulgaria; August 08-09, 2013)
• Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE) (Grenoble, France; August 30-01, 2013)
• HLT4LL: Human Language Technologies (HLT) for Language Learning (LL) (Nijmegen, the Netherlands; December 11, 2013)