(apologies for cross-posting)

FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

The 10th Workshop on the Innovative Use of NLP for Building
Educational Applications (BEA10)

Denver, CO, USA; June 04, 2015
(co-located with NACL)

http://www.cs.rochester.edu/~tetreaul/naacl-bea10.html

*Submission Deadline: March 08, 2015*



WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

We are excited to be holding the 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@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 solicits both full papers and short papers for oral and poster presentations. We also 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
o Content analysis for scoring/assessment
o Analysis of the structure of argumentation
o Grammatical error detection and correction
o Discourse and stylistic analysis
o Plagiarism detection
o Machine translation for assessment, instruction and curriculum development
o Detection of non-literal language (e.g., metaphor)
o Sentiment analysis
o Non-traditional genres (beyond essay scoring)

* Intelligent Tutoring (IT) and Game-based assessment that incorporates NLP
o Dialogue systems in education
o Hypothesis formation and testing
o Multi-modal communication between students and computers
o Generation of tutorial responses
o Knowledge representation in learning systems
o Concept visualization in learning systems

* Learner cognition
o Assessment of learners' language and cognitive skill levels
o Systems that detect and adapt to learners' cognitive or emotional states
o Tools for learners with special needs

* Use of corpora in educational tools
o Data mining of learner and other corpora for tool building
o Annotation standards and schemas / annotator agreement

* Tools and applications for classroom teachers and/or test developers
o NLP tools for second and foreign language learners
o Semantic-based access to instructional materials to identify appropriate texts
o Tools that automatically generate test questions
o Processing of and access to lecture materials across topics and genres
o Adaptation of instructional text to individual learners? grade levels
o Tools for text-based curriculum development
o E-learning tools for personalized course content
o Language-based educational games

* Descriptions and proposals for shared tasks

* Retrospective or survey papers on a particular NLP/Edu topic or field

* Vision papers discussing how the field should develop


SUBMISSION INFORMATION

We will be using the NAACL 2015 Submission Guidelines (http://naacl.org/naacl-pubs/) 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)
Notification of Acceptance: March 24
Camera-ready Papers Due: April 03
Workshop: June 04


PROGRAM CO-CHAIRS

Joel Tetreault (primary contact), Yahoo Labs
Jill Burstein, Educational Testing Service
Claudia Leacock, CTB-McGraw-Hill

Please write to: bea.nlp.workshop@gmail.com with any questions.


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