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. As a community we are continuing to improve existing capabilities and to identify and generate innovative ways to use NLP in applications for writing, reading, speaking, critical thinking, curriculum development, and assessment. Steady growth in the development of NLP-based applications for education has prompted an increased number of workshops, typically focusing on one specific subfield.
In this workshop, we solicit papers from all subfields: automated scoring, intelligent tutoring, learner cognition, use of corpora, grammatical error detection, and tools for teachers and test developers. 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 2012, 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, and ACL 2011), 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 ACL 2011, the workshop introduced a poster session that was lively and well-attended. We plan to continue to have poster sessions as a regular feature.
The practical need for language-analysis capabilities has been driven by increased requirements for state and national assessments, and a growing population of foreign and second language learners. There are currently a number of commercial systems that handle automated scoring of free-text and speech in the context of assessment as well as systems that address linguistic complexity in text - commonly referred to as readability measures. More recently, the need for applications for language analysis is emphasized by a new influence in the educational landscape in the United States, specifically, the Common Core State Standards initiative: (http://www.corestandards.org/) that is coordinated by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers. The initiative has now been adopted by 46 states for use in Kindergarten through 12th grade (K-12) classrooms. This initiative is likely to have a strong influence on teaching standards in K-12 education. The Common Core standards describe what K-12 students should be learning with regard to Reading, Writing, Speaking, Listening, Language, and Media and Technology. In addition, the Common Core recently released a Publishers Criteria document that describes the array of linguistic elements that learners need to grasp as they progress to the higher grades (http://www.corestandards.org/assets/Publishers_Criteria_for_3-12.pdf). The Common Core thereby introduces language analysis scenarios that have clear alignments with NLP research and applications.
The workshop will solicit both full papers and short papers for either oral or poster presentation. This year, the Helping Our Own (HOO-2) Shared Task on grammatical error detection will be co-located with the BEA7 workshop.
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. Deporting of assessment outcomes (e.g., automated scoring of free 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
- 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
HOO-2012 SHARED TASK
We are pleased to announce that the second edition of the "Helping Our Own" Shared Task on grammatical error detection will be co-located with BEA7 this year. The Shared Task will be organized independently from the BEA7. System description papers submitted and accepted to the HOO Shared Task will be presented as posters at the BEA Poster Session. In addition, the HOO organizations will summarize the results of the Shared Task in an oral presentation during the BEA. For more information on the task, as well as important dates and submission information, please go to: http://www.correcttext.org/hoo2012.
SUBMISSION INFORMATION
We will be using the NAACL-HLT 2012 Submission Guidelines for the BEA-7 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" in the START submission process.
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 2012 NAACL-HLT style sheet for composing your paper: http://www.naaclhlt2012.org/conference/conference.php
IMPORTANT DATES
Submission Deadline: March 26
Notification of Acceptance: April 23
Camera-ready papers Due: May 04
Workshop: June 07, 2012
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Andrea Abel, EURAC, Italy
Delphine Bernhard, Université de Strasbourg, France
Jared Bernstein, Pearson, USA
Chris Brockett, Microsoft Research, 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
Robert Dale, Macquarie University, Australia
Bill Dolan, Microsoft Research, USA
Maxine Eskenazi, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Keelan Evanini, Educational Testing Service, USA
Jennifer Foster, Dublin City University, Ireland
Annette Frank, University of Heidelberg, Germany
Michael Gamon, Microsoft, USA
Caroline Gasperin, TouchType, Brazil
Kallirroi Georgila, USC Institute for Creative Technologies, USA
Iryna Gurevych, University of Darmstadt, Germany
Na-Rae Han, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Trude Heift, Simon Frasier University, Canada
Derrick Higgins, Educational Testing Service, USA
Heng Ji, Queens College, USA
Pamela Jordan, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Ola Knutsson, KTH Nada, Sweden
John Lee, City University of Hong Kong, China
Xiaofei Lu, Penn State University, USA
Roger Levy, University of California San Diego, USA
Diane Litman, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Annie Louis, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Nitin Madnani, Educational Testing Service, USA
Montse Maritxalar, University of the Basque Country, Spain
Aurélien Max, LIMSI-CNRS, France
Detmar Meurers, University of Tübingen, Germany
Lisa Michaud, Merrimack College, USA
Rada Mihalcea, University of North Texas, USA
Michael Mohler, University of North Texas, USA
Jack Mostow, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Smaranda Muresan, Rutgers University, USA
Ani Nenkova, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Rodney Nielsen, University of Colorado, USA
Hwee Tou Ng, National University of Singapore, USA
Patti Price, PPRICE Speech and Language Technology, USA
Andrew Rosenberg, Queens College, CUNY, USA
Mihai Rotaru, TextKernel, the Netherlands
Dan Roth, University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne, USA
Alla Rozovskaya, University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne, USA
Mathias Schulze, University of Waterloo, Canada
Stephanie Seneff, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Izhak Shafran, Oregon Health & Science University, USA
Serge Sharoff, University of Leeds, UK
Svetlana Stenchikova, Open University, UK
Helmer Strik, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands
Nai-Lung Tsao, National Central University, Taiwan
Monica Ward, Dublin City University, Ireland
David Wible, National Central University, Taiwan
Peter Wood, University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada
Klaus Zechner, Educational Testing Service, USA