BEA 2015 - 10th Workshop on the Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications

We are excited to be proposing a 10th anniversary BEA workshop. Since starting in 1997, the BEA workshop, now one of the largest workshops at NAACL/ACL, has become one of the leading venues for publishing innovative work which uses NLP to develop educational applications.
The consistent interest and growth of the workshop has clear ties to societal need and related advances in the technology, and the maturity of the NLP/education field. NLP capabilities now support an array of learning domains, including writing, speaking, reading, and mathematics. Within these domains, the community continues to develop and deploy innovative NLP approaches for use in educational settings. In the writing and speech domains, automated writing evaluation (AWE) and speech scoring applications, respectively, are commercially deployed in high-stakes assessment and instructional settings, including Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). We also see widely-used commercial applications for plagiarism detection and peer review. Major advances in speech technology, have made it possible to include speech in both assessment and Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS). There has been a renewed interest in spoken dialog and multi-modal systems for instruction and assessment. We are also seeing explosive growth of mobile applications for game-based applications for instruction and assessment. The current educational and assessment landscape, especially in the United States, continues to foster a strong interest and high demand that pushes the state-of-the-art in AWE capabilities to expand the analysis of written responses to writing genres other than those traditionally found in standardized assessments, especially writing tasks requiring use of sources and argumentative discourse.
The use of NLP in educational applications has gained visibility outside of the NLP community. First, the Hewlett Foundation reached out to public and private sectors and sponsored two competitions: one for automated essay scoring , and the other for scoring of short answer, fact-based response items . The motivation driving these competitions was to engage the larger scientific community in this enterprise. MOOCs are now beginning to incorporate AWE systems to manage the thousands of constructed-response assignments collected during a single MOOC course. Learning-AT-Scale is a new venue for discussing NLP research in education. Another breakthrough for educational applications within the CL community is the presence of a number of shared-task competitions over the last three years. There have been three shared tasks on grammatical error correction with the most recent edition hosted at CoNLL 2014. In 2014 alone, there were four shared tasks for NLP and Education-related areas.
In 2015, we expect that the workshop (consistent with the nine previous workshops at ACL and NAACL/HLT), 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. This BEA10 workshop will solicit both full papers and short papers for oral and poster presentations. We will solicit papers for educational applications that incorporate NLP methods, including, but not limited to: automated scoring of open-ended textual and spoken responses; game-based instruction and assessment; intelligent tutoring; peer review, grammatical error detection; learner cognition; spoken dialog; multi-modal applications; tools for teachers and test developers; and use of corpora. Research that incorporates NLP methods for use with mobile and game-based platforms, and academic ePortfolio systems or MOOCs continues to be of special interest. Finally, as this is the 10th anniversary, we invite papers which provide a retrospective view, reflecting on past and current trends in the field, and vision papers which illustrate research directions for growth in the field. Specific topics include:
Automated scoring/evaluation for written student responses
Content analysis for scoring/assessment
Analysis of the structure of argumentation
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
Non-traditional genres (beyond essay scoring)
Intelligent Tutoring (IT) and Game-based assessment that incorporates NLP
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
Descriptions and proposals for shared tasks
Retrospective or survey papers on a particular NLP/Edu topic or field
Vision papers about ideas discussing how the field should develop
Submission Information
We will be using the NAACL 2015 Submission Guidelines for the BEA10 Workshop this year. Authors are invited to submit a full paper of up to 9 pages of content with up to 2 additional pages for references. We also invite short papers of up to 5 pages of content, including 2 additional pages for references. Please note that unlike previous years, final, camera ready versions of accepted papers will not be given an additional page to address reviewer comments.
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" 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) ...".
Please use the 2015 NAACL style sheets for composing your paper: http://naacl.org/naacl-pubs/ .
We will be using the START conference system to manage submissions (link forthcoming).
Important Dates
Submission Deadline: March 08 - 23:59 EST (New York City Time) [ Current EST ]
Notification of Acceptance: March 24
Camera-ready Papers Due: April 03
Workshop: June 04
Program Committee
Laura Allen, Arizona State University, USA
Timo Baumann, Universität Hamburg, Germany
Lee Becker, Hapara, USA
Beata Beigman Klebanov, Educational Testing Service, USA
Kay Berkling, Duale Hochschule Baden-Württemberg Karlsruhe, Germany
Delphine Bernhard, LiLPa, Université de Strasbourg, France
Suma Bhat, University of Illinois, USA
Kristy Boyer, North Carolina State University, USA
Ted Briscoe, University of Cambridge, UK
Chris Brockett, Microsoft Research, USA
Julian Brooke, University of Toronto, Canada
Aoife Cahill, Educational Testing Service, USA
Lei Chen, Educational Testing Service, USA
Min Chi, North Carolina State University, USA
Martin Chodorow, Educational Testing Service & CUNY, USA
Mark Core, University of Southern California, USA
Scott Crossley, Georgia State University, USA
Markus Dickinson, Indiana University, USA
Chris Dyer, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Myroslava Dzikovska, University of Edinburgh, UK
Yo Ehara, Multilingual Translation Lab., National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan
Keelan Evanini, Educational Testing Service, USA
Mariano Felice, University of Cambridge, UK
Oliver Ferschke, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Michael Flor, Educational Testing Service, USA
Jennifer Foster, Dublin City University, Ireland
Horacio Franco, SRI International, USA
Thomas François, Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium
Anette Frank, Heidelberg University, Germany
Michael Gamon, Microsoft Research, USA
Binyam Gebrekidan Gebre, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Netherlands
Ed Gehringer, North Carolina State University, USA
Kallirroi Georgila, University of Southern California, USA
Dan Goldwasser, Purdue University, USA
Cyril Goutte, National Research Council, Canada
Iryna Gurevych, University of Darmstadt, Germany
Trude Heift, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Michael Heilman, Educational Testing Service, USA
Derrick Higgins, Civis Analytics, USA
Andrea Horbach, Saarland University, Germany
Chung-Chi Huang, National Institutes of Health, USA
Radu Ionescu, University of Bucharest, Romania
Ross Israel, Factual, USA
Richard Johansson, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Levi King, Indiana University, USA
Ola Knutsson, Stockholm University, Sweden
Ekaterina Kochmar, University of Cambridge, UK
Mamoru Komachi, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Japan
Lun-Wei Ku, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
Kristopher Kyle, Georgia State University, USA
John Lee, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Samuel Leeman-Munk, North Carolina State University, USA
Chee Wee (Ben) Leong, Educational Testing Service, USA
James Lester, North Carolina State University, USA
Baoli Li, Henan University of Technology, China
Annie Louis, University of Edinburgh, UK
Anastassia Loukina, Educational Testing Service, USA
Xiaofei Lu, Penn State University, USA
Wencan Luo, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Nitin Madnani, Educational Testing Service, USA
Shervin Malmasi, Macquarie University, Australia
Montse Maritxalar, University of the Basque Country, Spain
Mourad Mars, Umm Al-Qura University, KSA
James Martin, University of Colorado Boulder, USA
Aurélien Max, LIMSI-CNRS & Univ. Paris Sud, France
Julie Medero, Harvey Mudd College, US
Detmar Meurers, Universität Tübingen, Germany
Lisa Michaud, Merrimack College, USA
Rada Mihalcea, University of Michigan, USA
Michael Mohler, Language Computer Corporation, USA
Jack Mostow, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Smaranda Muresan, Columbia University, USA
Ryo Nagata, Konan University, Japan
Ani Nenkova, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Hwee Tou Ng, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Rodney Nielsen, University of North Texas, USA
Alexis Palmer, Saarland University, Germany
Ted Pedersen, University of Minnesota, Duluth, USA
Ildiko Pilan, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Heather Pon-Barry, Mount Holyoke College, USA
Patti Price, PPRICE Speech and Language Technology, USA
Stephen Pulman, Oxford University, UK
Martí Quixal Martinez, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany
Lakshmi Ramachandran, Pearson Knowledge Technologies, USA
Vikram Ramanarayanan, Educational Testing Service, USA
Arti Ramesh, University of Maryland, College Park, USA
Andrew Rosenberg, CUNY Queens College, USA
Mihai Rotaru, Textkernel, Netherlands
Alla Rozovskaya, Columbia University, USA
Anton Rytting, University of Maryland, USA
Keisuke Sakaguchi, Johns Hopkins University, USA
Elizabeth Salesky, MITLL, USA
Mathias Schulze, University of Waterloo, USA
Izhak Shafran, Oregon Health & Science University, USA
Serge Sharoff, University of Leeds, UK
Swapna Somasundaran, Educational Testing Service, USA
Richard Sproat, Google, USA
Carla Strapparava, FBK-Irst, Italy
Helmer Strik, Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands
David Suendermann-Oeft, Educational Testing Service, USA
Sowmya Vajjala, Universität Tübingen, Germany
Giulia Venturi, Institute of Computational Linguistics "Antonio Zampolli", Italy
Carl Vogel, Trinity College, Ireland
Elena Volodina, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Xinhao Wang, Educational Testing Service, USA
Denise Whitelock, The Open University, UK
Magdalena Wolska, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany
Peter Wood, University of Saskatchewan, Canada
Wenting Xiong, IBM, USA
Huichao Xue, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Marcos Zampieri, Saarland University, Germany
Klaus Zechner, Educational Testing Service, USA
Torsten Zesch, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
Fan Zhang, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Xiaodan Zhu, National Research Council, Canada
Related Links
NAACL 2015
1st Workshop on Building Educational Applications Using NLP (2003)
2nd Workshop on Building Educational Applications Using NLP (2005)
3rd Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (2008)
4th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (2009)
5th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (2010)
6th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (2011)
7th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (2012)
8th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (2013)
9th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (2014)