WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

​

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@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