2023Q3 Reports: SIGEDU

2023Q3 Reports: SIGEDU

Membership: SIGEDU has 359 members.

Officers: Officers were elected to serve from 2021 - 2024 as follows: Ekaterina Kochmar, Chair; Andrea Horbach, Secretary; Zheng Yuan, Treasurer. Next elections will be held in 2024.

Board: The SIGEDU Committee is composed of Ekaterina Kochmar, Andrea Horbach, Zheng Yuan, Jill Burstein, Nitin Madnani, Anais Tack, and Victoria Yaneva. Ronja Laarmann-Quante and Torsten Zesch are continuing members of the Organizing Committee for the annual workshop for Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Application (BEA).

Workshop: The SIG’s major activity is the organization of the annual workshop. In 2023, the 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Application (BEA) was held in a hybrid mode, in Toronto in conjunction with ACL 2023 and online. BEA 2023 received 110 submissions and hosted a shared task on generation of teacher responses in educational dialogues and two keynotes: by Susan Lottridge (Cambium Assessment) on Building Educational Applications using NLP: A Measurement Perspective, and by Jordana Heller (Textio) on Interrupting Linguistic Bias in Written Communication with NLP tools. In addition, SIGEDU is part of the ambassador paper exchange program within the International Alliance to Advance Learning in the Digital Era (IAALDE), and in 2023, BEA hosted an ambassador talk Generating Teacher Responses in Educational Dialogues: The AI Teacher Test by Anaïs Tack (KU Leuven) representing the International Educational Data Mining Society (IEDMS). The SIG intends to submit a workshop proposal to an ACL-sponsored conference in 2024.

Other activities: The SIG is on the Board of the International Alliance to Advance Learning in the Digital Age. Part of this relationship involves selecting a paper from the SIG’s workshop to be presented at another venue associated with other Board members. This is an effort to cross-pollinate across AI in education organizations. As part of the workshop, organizers selected the papers with the best reviews and highest scores to be presented at BEA. The workshop attendees voted for the best presentation. This paper will be selected to represent the SIG at one of the other venues participating in http://www.alliancelss.com/. In addition, the SIG is planning to organize a series of online seminars in 2023–2024 to foster closer ongoing communication and exchange of ideas between the members of the SIGEDU community.

Website and mailing list: We have a working website (https://sig-edu.org) that lists upcoming events of interest to our members and links to BEA proceedings. New members can sign up through a form on the website.