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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 workshop’s continuing growth highlights the alignment between societal needs and technological advances: for instance, BEA16 in 2021 hosted a panel discussion on New Challenges for Educational Technology in the Time of the Pandemic addressing the pressing issues around COVID19. NLP capabilities can now support an array of learning domains, including writing, speaking, reading, science, and mathematics, as well as the related intra-personal (e.g., self-confidence) and inter-personal (e.g., peer collaboration) skills. Within these areas, the community continues to develop and deploy innovative NLP approaches for use in educational settings. Another breakthrough for educational applications within the CL community is the presence of a number of shared-task competitions organized by the BEA workshop over the past several years, including four shared tasks on grammatical error detection and correction alone. NLP/Education shared tasks have also seen new areas of research, such as the Automated Evaluation of Scientific Writing at BEA11, Native Language Identification at BEA12, Second Language Acquisition Modelling at BEA13, and Complex Word Identification at BEA13. These competitions increased the visibility of, and interest in, our field.
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, a large poster session to maximize the amount of original work presented, and a panel discussion to encourage interaction between workshop participants. We expect that the workshop will continue to highlight novel technologies and opportunities for educational NLP in English as well as other languages. The workshop will solicit both full papers and short papers for either oral or poster presentation.
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);
• 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.
INVITED TALKS
The workshop 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 11.59 pm 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 or Friday, July 14, 2023 (TBD)
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. Specifically:
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
Workshop contact email address: bea.nlp.workshop [at] gmail.com