The 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications

Event Notification Type: 
Call for Papers
Abbreviated Title: 
BEA 2023
Location: 
co-located with ACL 2023
Thursday, 13 July 2023
State: 
Country: 
Canada
City: 
Toronto
Contact: 
BEA Workshop
Submission Deadline: 
Monday, 24 April 2023

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

The BEA Workshop is a leading venue for NLP innovation in the context of educational applications. It is one of the largest one-day workshops in the ACL community with over 100 registered attendees in the past several years. The growing interest in educational applications and a diverse community of researchers involved resulted in the creation of the Special Interest Group in Educational Applications (SIGEDU) in 2017, which currently has over 300 members.

The 18th BEA workshop will have keynotes by Susan Lottridge (Cambium Assessment) and Jordana Heller (Textio), an invited paper presentation by a member of one of the educational societies from the International Alliance to Advance Learning in the Digital Era (IAALDE), oral presentation sessions, and a large poster session. We expect that the workshop will continue to highlight novel technologies and opportunities for educational NLP in a range of languages.

We will solicit papers that incorporate NLP methods, including, but not limited to:

  • automated scoring of open-ended textual and spoken responses;
  • automated scoring/evaluation for written student responses (across multiple genres);
  • AI and ML methods in educational applications;
  • integration of large language models (LLMs) in educational applications;
  • game-based instruction and assessment;
  • educational data mining;
  • intelligent tutoring;
  • collaborative learning environments;
  • peer review;
  • grammatical error detection and correction;
  • learner cognition;
  • spoken dialog;
  • multimodal applications;
  • annotation standards and schemas;
  • tools and applications for classroom teachers, learners and/or test developers; and
  • use of corpora in educational tools.

SHARED TASK

Webpage: https://sig-edu.org/sharedtask/2023

BEA 2023 is hosting a shared task on generation of teacher responses in educational dialogues. Participants will be provided with teacher–student dialogue samples from the Teacher Student Chatroom Corpus (Caines et al., 2020) of real-world teacher–student interactions and will be asked to generate teacher responses using NLP and AI methods. Submissions will be ranked according to automated evaluation metrics, with the top submissions selected for further human evaluation. Given active participation in the previous BEA-hosted shared tasks, we expect to attract around 20 participating teams.

Organizers: Anaïs Tack, KU Leuven; Ekaterina Kochmar, MBZUAI; Zheng Yuan, King’s College London; Serge Bibauw, Universidad Central del Ecuador; Chris Piech, Stanford University

INVITED TALKS

BEA 2023 will feature invited talks from Susan Lottridge (Cambium Assessment) and Jordana Heller (Textio), as well as a speaker from one of the IAALDE societies.

IMPORTANT DATES

All deadlines are 11:59pm UTC-12 (anywhere on earth).

  • Anonymity Period Begins: Friday, March 24, 2023
  • Submission Deadline: Monday, April 24, 2023
  • Notification of Acceptance: Monday, May 22, 2023
  • Camera-ready Papers Due: Tuesday, May 30, 2023
  • Workshop: Thursday, July 13, 2023

SUBMISSION INFORMATION

We will be using the ACL Submission Guidelines for the BEA Workshop this year. Authors are invited to submit a long paper of up to eight (8) pages of content, plus unlimited references; final versions of long papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 9 pages) so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account. We also invite short papers of up to four (4) pages of content, plus unlimited references. Upon acceptance, short papers will be given five (5) content pages in the proceedings. Authors are encouraged to use this additional page to address reviewers’ comments in their final versions. 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 “long 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) …”.
We have also included conflict of interest in the submission form. You should mark all potential reviewers who have been authors on the paper, are from the same research group or institution, or who have seen versions of this paper or discussed it with you.

We will be using the START conference system to manage submissions: https://www.softconf.com/acl2023/bea2023/

DOUBLE SUBMISSION POLICY

We will follow the official ACL double-submission policy. Papers being submitted both to BEA and another conference or workshop must:

  • Note on the title page the other conference or workshop to which they are being submitted.
  • State on the title page that if the authors choose to present their paper at BEA (assuming it was accepted), then the paper will be withdrawn from other conferences and workshops.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

  • Ekaterina Kochmar, MBZUAI
  • Jill Burstein, Duolingo
  • Andrea Horbach, FernUniversität in Hagen
  • Ronja Laarmann-Quante, Ruhr University Bochum
  • Nitin Madnani, Educational Testing Service
  • Anaïs Tack, KU Leuven
  • Victoria Yaneva, National Board of Medical Examiners
  • Zheng Yuan, King’s College London
  • Torsten Zesch, FernUniversität in Hagen