NLP-TEA 2015 - 2nd Workshop on Natural Language Processing Techniques for Educational Applications

The aim of this workshop is to provide a forum where international participants can share knowledge on the computer-assisted language learning. For the past decade, research and development in the NLP community has advanced techniques for educational applications. For example, the NLP community in North America organizes a series of workshops on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA) to improve existing capabilities and to generate creative ways to use NLP in educational applications for writing, reading, assessment, and so on. In addition to research papers, several shared tasks were also organized, e.g. “Helping Our Own” (HOO) English grammatical error detection/correction competitions in 2011 and 2012, and Native Language Identification (NLI) competitions in 2013. Independent of the series of BEA workshops, the CoNLL-2013 shared task is on grammatical error correction for learner’s English as a Foreign Language (EFL). In addition, there is a SemEval shared task on student’s response analysis. All of these competitions will increase the visibility of educational application research in the NLP community.
However, the workshops and shared tasks mentioned above predominantly focus on English language learning. Unlike the English learning setting for which many learning technologies have been developed, learning tools to support Asian language learners are relatively rare. In response, we organized the first NLP-TEA workshop with a shared task on Chinese as a Foreign Language (NLP-TEA-1 & CFL) in conjunction with the 22nd International Conference on Computers in Education (ICCE 2014), which is the flagship conference in computer education area. The ICCE 2014 in Japan provides an ideal opportunity to bring together influential as well as aspiring researchers in computer education area, to deliberate and interact on a range of research issues. The purpose of NLP-TEA series is to identify challenging problems facing the development of computer-assisted techniques for Asian language learning, and to shape future research directions through the publication of high quality, applied and theoretical research findings. We solicit submissions of research studies on all topics related to NLP techniques for educational applications in terms of both full papers (8+2 pages) and short papers (4+2 pages) for either oral or poster presentation. We will give special attention to research that has taken computer-assisted Asian language learning into consideration. Besides, one of our key goals of this workshop is to foster collaboration between researchers and developers from computational linguistics and computer education areas. Original studies reporting joint work are therefore especially encouraged. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
Assessment of learners' language proficiency
Automated essay scoring
Educational Data Mining
Error tagging editor / annotation schema
Grammatical error detection / identification / correction
Intelligent tutoring systems
Language courseware development
Learner corpus development / analysis / evaluation tools
NLP tools for language learning
Second language acquisition
Sentence judgment system
Spelling error check