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.
NLP-based educational applications continue to develop in order to serve the
learning and assessment needs of students, teachers, schools, and testing
organizations. Contributions to the educational problem space include: development of curriculum and assessment (e.g., applications that help teachers develop reading materials), delivery of curriculum and assessments (e.g., applications where the student receives instruction and interacts with the system), and reporting of assessment outcomes (e.g., automated essay scoring). The need for, and the rapid development of, language-based capabilities have been driven by increased requirements for state and national assessments, and a growing population of foreign and second language learners.
In the past ten years, the steady growth in the area of NLP-based applications for education has prompted an increased number of workshops which typically focus on one specific aspect of NLP-based educational applications. In this workshop, we solicit papers from all subfields. The workshops on the "Innovative Use of NLP in Building Educational Applications" have continued to bring together all these subfields to foster interaction and collaboration among researchers in both academic institutions and industry. This workshop offers a venue for researchers to present and discuss work in this area. Each year, workshop submission numbers and attendance grows, and the state of the research becomes more innovative and advanced. In the past two years, at NAACL/HLT 2009 and 2010, the workshop received a record number of submissions and attendees. The 2011 workshop (consistent with previous workshops at ACL 1997, NAACL/HLT 2003, ACL 2005, ACL 2008, NAACL/HLT 2009, and NAACL/HLT 2010)
will continue to expose the NLP research community to these technologies as they continue to identify novel opportunities for the use of NLP techniques and tools in educational applications.
The workshop will solicit both full papers (8 pages plus 2 pages for references) and short papers (4 pages plus 2 pages for references) for either oral or poster presentation. We will give special attention to research that has taken into serious consideration the educational problem space into which their work fits. Topics will include, but will not be limited to, the following:
1) 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
2) Intelligent Tutoring (IT) that incorporate 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
3) 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
4) Use of corpora in educational tools
* Data mining of learner and other corpora for tool building
* Annotation standards and schemas / annotator agreement
5) Tools 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 such as multiple
choice or short answer
* Processing of and access to lecture materials across topics and genres
* Adaptation of instructional text to individual learners' grade levels
* E-learning tools for personalized course content
* Language-based educational games
6) Issues concerning the evaluation of NLP-based educational tools
7) Descriptions of implemented systems
SUBMISSION INFORMATION
We will be using the ACL-HLT 2011 Submission Guidelines for the BEA-6 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). This year, 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.
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 2011 ACL-HLT style sheet for composing your paper:
http://www.acl2011.org/call.shtml#submission
IMPORTANT DATES
Submission Deadline: April 01, 2011
Notification of Acceptance: April 25, 2011
Camera-ready papers Due: May 06, 2011
Workshop: June 24, 2011
WORKSHOP CHAIRS
Joel Tetreault, ETS, USA (principal contact: JTetreault [at] ets.org)
Jill Burstein, ETS, USA
Claudia Leacock, Butler Hill Group, USA
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Delphine Bernhard, LIMSI-CNRS, France
Jared Bernstein, Pearson, USA
Chris Brockett, MSR, USA
Martin Chodorow, Hunter College, CUNY, USA
Mark Core, Institute for Creative Technologies
Barbara Di Eugenio, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
Markus Dickinson, Indiana University, USA
Bill Dolan, Microsoft, USA
Maxine Eskenazi, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Peter Foltz, Pearson Knowledge Technologies, USA
Jennifer Foster, Dublin City University, Ireland
Michael Gamon, Microsoft, USA
Caroline Gasperin, University of Sao Paolo, Brazil
Kallirroi Georgila, Institute for Creative Technologies
Iryna Gurevych, University of Darmstadt, Germany
Na-Rae Han, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Trude Heift, Simon Frasier University, Canada
Derrick Higgins, ETS, USA
Emi Izumi, NICT, Japan
Heng Ji, Queens College, USA
Pamela Jordan, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Ola Knutsson, KTH Nada, Sweden
John Lee, MIT, USA
Diane Litman, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Annie Louis, University of Pennsylvania,
Nitin Madnani, ETS, USA
Montse Maritxalar, University of the Basque Country, Spain
James Martin, University of Colorado
Aurélien Max, LIMSI-CNRS, France
Detmar Meurers, University of Tübingen, Germany
Lisa Michaud, Merrimack College, USA
Rada Mihalcea, University of North Texas
Michael Mohler, University of North Texas
Jack Mostow, CMU, USA
Smaranda Muresan, Rutgers University, USA
Ani Nenkova, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Mari Ostendorf, University of Washington, USA
Ted Pedersen, University of Minnesota, USA
Mihai Rotaru, TextKernel, the Netherlands
Dan Roth, UIUC, USA
Alla Rozovskaya, UIUC, USA
Mathias Schulze, University of Waterloo, Canada
Stephanie Seneff, MIT, USA
Jana Sukkarieh, ETS, USA
Svetlana Stenchikova, Open University, UK
Nai-Lung Tsao, National Central University, Taiwan
Monica Ward, Dublin City University, Ireland
Pete Whitelock, Oxford University Press, UK
David Wible, National Central University, Taiwan