CALL FOR PAPERS

NAACL-HLT 2009

The 4th Workshop on the Innovative Use of NLP for Building
Educational Applications

Boulder, Colorado; June 04 or 05, 2009

http://www.cs.rochester.edu/~tetreaul/naacl-bea4.html

Submission Deadline: March 06, 2009




WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

The Innovative Use of NLP in Educational Applications workshops have fostered
interaction and collaboration among researchers in intelligent tutoring systems
(ITS) using text and speech, scoring of free-response assessments and
proofreading tools. This workshop will continue to explore NLP technologies
with the goal of identifying novel use of NLP techniques and tools for the
development of educational applications.

We are increasing the scope of the workshop to (1) include a demo and poster
session and (2) begin to plan for the first shared task of the workshop:
grammatical error detection and correction of articles and prepositions (for
2010 workshop).

Full paper, demo and poster submission topics will include, but will not be
limited to the following:

1) 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


2) Intelligent Tutoring (IT) that incorporate 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

3) 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

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

5) Tools 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 - such as
multiple choice or short answer
* Processing of and access to lecture materials across topics and
genres
* Adaptation of instructional text to individual learners' grade
levels
* assist in text-based curriculum development
* E-learning tools for personalized course content
* Language-based educational games

6) Issues involving the shared tasks for the 2010 Workshop: Grammatical error
detection and correction


7) Issues concerning the evaluation of NLP-based educational tools


8) Descriptions of implemented systems


SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Authors are invited to submit a full paper of up to 8 pages in electronic,
PDF format (with up to 1 additional page for references). 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) ...". Style files will be available soon.


IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline: March 06, 2009
Notification of acceptance: March 30, 2009
Camera-ready papers due: April 12, 2009
Workshop: June 04 or 05, 2009



WORKSHOP CHAIRS

Joel Tetreault, ETS, USA (principal contact: JTetreault@ets.org)
Jill Burstein, ETS, USA
Claudia Leacock, Butler Hill Group, USA



PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Martin Chodorow, Hunter College, CUNY, USA
Bill Dolan, Microsoft, USA
Jennifer Foster, Dublin City University, Ireland
Michael Gamon, Microsoft, USA
Maxine Eskenazi, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Na-Rae Han, Korea University, Korea
Trude Heift, Simon Frasier University, Canada
Derrick Higgins, ETS, USA
Emi Izumi, NICT, Japan
Ola Knutsson, KTH Nada, Sweden
John Lee, MIT, USA
Diane Litman, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Detmar Meurers, University of Tubingen, Germany
Lisa Michaud, Saint Anselm College, USA
Ani Nenkova, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Mathias Schulze, University of Waterloo, Canada
Stephanie Seneff, MIT, USA
Richard Sproat, UIUC, USA
Jana Sukkarieh, ETS, USA
David Wible, Tamkang University, Taiwan