PRELIMINARY CALL FOR PAPERS

The 8th Workshop on the Innovative Use of NLP for Building
Educational Applications (BEA8)

Atlanta, Georgia, USA; June 13 or 14, 2013
(co-located with NAACL-HLT)

http://www.cs.rochester.edu/~tetreaul/naacl-bea8.html

Submission Deadline: March 11, 2013 (tentative)



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.

In 2012, the use of NLP in educational contexts took two major steps
forward. First, outside of the computational linguistics community, the
Hewlett Foundation reached out to both the public and private sectors and
sponsored two competitions: one on automated essay scoring (Automated
Student Assessment Prize: ASAP, Phase 1:http://www.kaggle.com/c/asap-aes),
and a second on short-answer scoring (Phase 2:
http://www.kaggle.com/c/asap-sas). The motivation driving these
competitions was to engage the larger scientific community in this
enterprise. The two competitions were inspired by the Common Core State
Initiative (http://www.corestandards.org/), an influential set of standards
adopted by 45 states in the U.S. The Initiative describes what K-12 students
should be learning with regard to Reading, Writing, Speaking, Listening, and
Media and Technology. Another breakthrough for educational applications
within the computational linguistics community was the second edition of the
"Helping Our Own" grammatical error detection/correction competition at last
year's BEA workshop - where 14 systems competed. In 2013, independent of
the BEA workshop, there will be two shared task competitions. This year's
CoNLL Shared Task is on grammatical error correction and there is a SemEval
Shared Task on Student Response Analysis
(http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/semeval-2013/task7/). Both of these competitions
will increase the visibility of the educational problem space in the NLP
community.

In this year's BEA workshop, we are soliciting papers across a broad range
of educational applications, including: intelligent tutoring, learner
cognition, use of corpora, grammatical error detection, tools for teachers
and test developers, and automated scoring and evaluation of open-ended
responses. 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 2013, 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, ACL 2011, NAACL HLT
2012), 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 NAACL HLT 2012, the workshop coordinated with
the HOO shared task for grammatical error detection, generating a much
larger poster session that was lively and well-attended. In 2013, the
workshop will host the first Native Language Identification Shared Task,
described in detail later in this cfp.

The workshop will solicit both full papers and short papers for either oral
or poster presentation. 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. Reporting of assessment outcomes (e.g., automated scoring of open-ended
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
* 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

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


Submission information
---------------------------------------------
We will be using the NAACL-HLT 2013 Submission Guidelines for the BEA-8
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.

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 2013 NAACL-HLT style sheet for composing your paper:
http://naacl2013.naacl.org/CFP.aspx (see Format section for style files).


Important dates
------------------------------
Submission Deadline: March 11 (tentative)
Notification of Acceptance: March 29
Camera-ready papers Due: May 04
Workshop: June 13 or 14


Workshop chairs
---------------------------------
Joel Tetreault, ETS, USA (principal contact: bea8.workshop@gmail.com)
Jill Burstein, ETS, USA
Claudia Leacock, CTB McGraw-Hill, USA


Native language identification shared task
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
We are pleased to host the first edition of a shared task on Native Language
Identification (NLI). The shared task will be organized by Joel Tetreault,
Aoife Cahill (ETS) and Daniel Blanchard (ETS). NLI is the task of
identifying the native language (L1) of a writer based solely on a sample of
their writing. The task is typically framed as a classification problem
where the set of L1s is known a priori. Most work has focused on
identifying the native language of writers learning English as a second
language. To date this topic has motivated several ACL and EMNLP papers, as
well as a master's thesis.

Native Language Identification (NLI) can be useful for a number of
applications. In educational settings, NLI can be used to provide more
targeted feedback to language learners about their errors. It is well known
that learners of different languages make different errors depending on
their L1s. A writing tutor system which can detect the native language of
the learner will be able to tailor the feedback about the error and contrast
it with common properties of the learner's language. In addition, native
language is often used as a feature that goes into authorship profiling,
which is frequently used in forensic linguistics.

Details on the shared task can be found on the website:
https://sites.google.com/site/nlisharedtask2013/home


Program committee
---------------------------------------
Andrea Abel, EURAC, Italy
Sumit Basu, Microsoft Research, USA
Lee Becker, Avaya Labs, USA
Beata Beigman Klebanov, Educational Testing Service, USA
Delphine Bernhard, Université de Strasbourg, France
Jared Bernstein, Pearson, USA
Kristy Boyer, North Carolina State University, USA
Chris Brew, Educational Testing Service, USA
Ted Briscoe, University of Cambridge, UK
Chris Brockett, MSR, USA
Aoife Cahill, Educational Testing Service, 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
Bill Dolan, Microsoft, USA
Myrosia Dzikovska, University of Edinburgh, UK
Keelan Evanini, Educational Testing Service, USA
Michael Flor, Educational Testing Service, USA
Peter Foltz, Pearson Knowledge Technologies, USA
Jennifer Foster, Dublin City University, Ireland
Horacio Franco, SRI, USA
Michael Gamon, Microsoft, USA
Caroline Gasperin, SwiftKey, UK
Kallirroi Georgila, USC Institute for Creative Technologies, USA
Iryna Gurevych, University of Darmstadt, Germany
Kadri Hacioglu, Rossetta Stone, USA
Na-Rae Han, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Trude Heift, Simon Frasier University, Canada
Michael Heilman, Educational Testing Service, USA
Derrick Higgins, Educational Testing Service, USA
Ross Israel, Indiana University, 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
Jackson Liscombe, Nuance Communications, USA
Diane Litman, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Annie Louis, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Xiaofei Lu, Penn State University, USA
Nitin Madnani, Educational Testing Service, USA
Montse Maritxalar, University of the Basque Country, Spain
James Martin, University of Colorado, USA
Aurélien Max, LIMSI-CNRS, France
Detmar Meurers, University of Tübingen, Germany
Lisa Michaud, Merrimack College, USA
Michael Mohler, University of North Texas
Smaranda Muresan, Rutgers University, USA
Ani Nenkova, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Hwee Tou Ng, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Rodney Nielsen, University of North Texas, USA
Ted Pedersen, University of Minnesota, USA
Bryan Pellom, Rossetta Stone, USA
Patti Price, PPRICE Speech and Language Technology, USA
Andrew Rosenberg, Queens College, CUNY, USA
Mihai Rotaru, TextKernel, The Netherlands
Dan Roth, UIUC, USA
Alla Rozovskaya, UIUC, USA
Izhak Shafran, Oregon Health & Science University, USA
Serge Sharoff, University of Leeds, UK
Richard Sproat, Google, USA
Svetlana Stenchikova, Columbia University, USA
Helmer Strik, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Joseph Tepperman, Rosetta Stone, USA
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
Peter Wood, University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada
Klaus Zechner, Educational Testing Service, USA
Torsten Zesch, University of Darmstadt, Germany