Hi all, hope you are all doing well! The sixth BEA newsletter contains the following:
BEA10 Announcements
Upcoming EduNLP Conferences / Workshops
EduNLP Resources
Recent EduNLP Publications
I'd like to thank our new BEA Newsletter volunteers: Ekaterina Kochmar, Ildiko Pilan and Somwya V. B. for massively assisting in the writing of this newsletter. Thanks!
As always, if you know of any corpora, resources, tools, pubs, conferences, etc. that would be good to have on the newsletter, please let us know and they'll go in the next one.
Have a great new year and see you in 2015!
Joel
1. BEA10 Announcements
The dates for the 10th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, co-located with NAACL-HLT 2015 in Denver, USA, have been set:
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
Also note that we differ slightly from the NAACL submission guidelines in that long papers are 9 pages and short paper are 5 pages. There will be no additional page for revisions. As this is the tenth edition of the workshop which is very exciting, we are also soliciting papers which are retrospectives on the field or parts of the field and also forward-looking papers which describe your thoughts on how the field should progress or new directions it should take. We hope you submit some! Finally, we are also soliciting sponsors for the BEA this year. Contributions will go towards an invited speaker, dinner for students attending the workshop and t-shirts. If you or your institution are interested in becoming a sponsor please email us back at this address. Gold level sponsorship is $250USD, silver level is $100USD.
2. Other Upcoming EduNLP Conferences and Workshops
* Artificial Intelligence in Education http://perseo.lsi.uned.es/aied2015/
(deadline: January 16, dates: June 22-27, location: Madrid)
* Educational Data Mining Conf: http://www.educationaldatamining.org/EDM2015/
(deadline: February 02, dates: June 26-29, location: Madrid)
3. Resources
The following papers were presented at LREC and describe corpora or tools that can be relevant to EduNLP research.
FLELex: a graded lexical resource for French foreign learners
A Corpus of Machine Translation Errors Extracted from Translation Students Exercises
L14-1239 📷 [bib]: Kay Berkling; Johanna Fay; Masood Ghayoomi; Katrin Hein; Rémi Lavalley; Ludwig Linhuber; Sebastian Stüker
A Database of Freely Written Texts of German School Students for the Purpose of Automatic Spelling Error Classification
L14-1407 📷 [bib]: Camille Fauth; Anne Bonneau; Frank Zimmerer; Juergen Trouvain; Bistra Andreeva; Vincent Colotte; Dominique Fohr; Denis Jouvet; Jeanin Jügler; Yves Laprie; Odile Mella; Bernd Möbius
Designing a Bilingual Speech Corpus for French and German Language Learners: a Two-Step Process
Language Editing Dataset of Academic Texts
KoKo: an L1 Learner Corpus for German
L14-1721 📷 [bib]: Wajdi Zaghouani; Behrang Mohit; Nizar Habash; Ossama Obeid; Nadi Tomeh; Alla Rozovskaya; Noura Farra; Sarah Alkuhlani; Kemal Oflazer
Large Scale Arabic Error Annotation: Guidelines and Framework
Empirical Analysis of Aggregation Methods for Collective Annotation
DKPro Agreement: An Open-Source Java Library for Measuring Inter-Rater Agreement
Detecting Learner Errors in the Choice of Content Words Using Compositional Distributional Semantics
4. Publications 2014 was yet another banner year for EduNLP publications. We've gone through the last six months of conferences and workshops in the ACL Anthology and pulled out the ones that seemed most relevant to the community that you might want to know about. In addition, we've done some web searching and found papers outside the Anthology that are also relevant (see end of email). Enjoy.
* EMNLP
This year's EMNLP had the most educational-oriented papers ever in the conference's existence, at a whopping eleven. Additionally, there were several education workshops and shared tasks co-located with the conference. Please see below:
Identifying Argumentative Discourse Structures in Persuasive Essays
Go Climb a Dependency Tree and Correct the Grammatical Errors
A Graph-based Approach for Contextual Text Normalization
Resolving Shell Nouns
System Combination for Grammatical Error Correction
Data Driven Grammatical Error Detection in Transcripts of Children's Speech
Can characters reveal your native language? A language-independent approach to native language identification
D14-1153 [bib] [attachment]: Imene Bensalem; Paolo Rosso; Salim Chikhi
Intrinsic Plagiarism Detection using N-gram Classes
Keystroke Patterns as Prosody in Digital Writings: A Case Study with Deceptive Reviews and Essays
Fast and Accurate Misspelling Correction in Large Corpora
Language Transfer Hypotheses with Linear SVM Weights
* EMNLP Workshops and Shared Tasks
* The EMNLP 2014 Workshop on Arabic Natural Language Processing. Link: http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W/W14/W14-36.pdf#page=171
* Workshop on Analysis of Large Scale Social Interaction in MOOCs (also included a shared task):
* Workshop on Arabic NLP had a shared task on Arabic error correction:
* The Workshop on Language Technology for Closely Related Languages and Variants has some overlap with Native Language Identification so may be of interest to some people:
* COLING
Empirical Analysis of Aggregation Methods for Collective Annotation
Finding your "inner-annotator": An experiment in annotator independence for rating discourse coherence quality in essays
Focus Annotation in Reading Comprehension Data
Lexical Chaining for Measuring Discourse Coherence Quality in Test-taker Essays
Detecting Learner Errors in the Choice of Content Words Using Compositional Distributional Semantics
Language Family Relationship Preserved in Non-native English
Exploring Syntactic Features for Native Language Identification: A Variationist Perspective on Feature Encoding and Ensemble Optimization
Improving Cloze Test Performance of Language Learners Using Web N-Grams
How to deal with students' writing problems? Process-oriented writing support with the digital Writing Aid Dutch
C14-2015 [bib]: Lung-Hao Lee; Liang-Chih Yu; Kuei-Ching Lee; Yuen-Hsien Tseng; Li-Ping Chang; Hsin-Hsi Chen
A Sentence Judgment System for Grammatical Error Detection
* Australasian Language Technology Workshop (ALTA)
There were two papers at this year's ALTA which had an educational bent:
Automated Generation of Test Suites for Error Analysis of Concept Recognition Systems
Finnish Native Language Identification
* NLP4CALL
A workshop bringing together researchers and other specialists involved in integrating NLP and Speech Technologies in Computer-Assisted Language Learning systems. It took place in Uppsala, Sweden, Nov. 13, 2014. Link to all the papers: https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W/W14/#3500.
The homepage of the workshop: http://spraakbanken.gu.se/swe/forskning/ICALL/3rdNLP4CALL.
* EduNLP Publications
The following lists papers that weren't in the ACL Anthology.
The Elementary School Journal, published by the University of Chicago Press, has a special issue on "Understanding Text Complexity" and has a collection of articles about the relevance of analysing text complexity for educational standards on what students read.
Another relevant paper which discusses the impact of NLP tools in helping English language teachers: "From Teacher Professional Development to the Classroom: How NLP Technology Can Enhance Teachers' Linguistic Awareness to Support Curriculum Development for English Language Learners" - by Burstein et.al., (2014). Journal of Educational Computing Research 51(1).
Emran, M. A., & Shaalan, K. (2014). A Survey of Intelligent Language Tutoring Systems. In Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI, 2014 International Conference on (pp. 393-399). IEEE. Link: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6968503&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D6968503
Burstein, J., Shore, J., Sabatini, J., Moulder, B., Lentini, J., Biggers, K., & Holtzman, S. (2014). From Teacher Professional Development to the Classroom: How NLP Technology Can Enhance Teachers' Linguistic Awareness to Support Curriculum Development for English Language Learners. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 51(1), 119-144. Link: http://baywood.metapress.com/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,6,6;journal,3,201;linkingpublicationresults,1:300321,1
Crossley, S. A., Kyle, K., Allen, L. K., Guo, L., & McNamara, D. S. (2014) Linguistic microfeatures to predict L2 writing proficiency: A case study in Automated Writing Evaluation. The Journal of Writing Assessment. Link: http://www.journalofwritingassessment.org/article.php?article=74
Some other suggestions from Google Scholar:
Elisa Corino (2014) Bottom up specialized phraseology in CLIL teaching classes. In Proceedings of KONVENS 2014. Link: http://opus.bsz-bw.de/ubhi/volltexte/2014/322/pdf/konvens2014_workshop_proceedings.pdf#page=87
Margarita Alonso Ramos, Marcos Garcıa Salido and Orsolya Vincze (2014) Towards a collocation writing assistant for learners of Spanish. In Proceedings of KONVENS 2014. Link: http://opus.bsz-bw.de/ubhi/volltexte/2014/322/pdf/konvens2014_workshop_proceedings.pdf#page=87
Serge Verlinde (2014) Turning garbage into a writing assistant. In Proceedings of KONVENS 2014. Link: http://opus.bsz-bw.de/ubhi/volltexte/2014/322/pdf/konvens2014_workshop_proceedings.pdf#page=87
Hrvoje Hlebec, Wilfried Hehr and Ronny Jauch (2014) A lexical database for systematic orthographical teaching and training of German orthography. In Proceedings of KONVENS 2014. Link: http://opus.bsz-bw.de/ubhi/volltexte/2014/322/pdf/konvens2014_workshop_proceedings.pdf#page=87
Brendan Flanagan, Chengjiu Yin, Takahiko Suzuki, and Sachio Hirokawa (2014) Classification of English language learner writing errors using a parallel corpus with SVM. In International Journal of Knowledge and Web Intelligence, 5(1/2014):21-35. Link: http://inderscience.metapress.com/content/v551323u321u4703/
Heshaam Faili, Nava Ehsan, Mortaza Montazery and Mohammad Taher Pilehvar (2014) Vafa spell-checker for detecting spelling, grammatical, and real-word errors of Persian language. In Lit Linguist Computing. Link: http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/09/07/llc.fqu043.short
Marcos Zampieri, Liling Tan (2014) Grammatical Error Detection with Limited Training Data: The Case of Chinese. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Computers in Education. Link: http://www.uni-koeln.de/~mzampier/papers/icce2014.pdf
Roman Grundkiewicz and Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt (2014) The WikEd Error Corpus: A Corpus of Corrective Wikipedia Edits and Its Application to Grammatical Error Correction. In Advances in Natural Language Processing, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 8686, pp 478-490. Link: http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-10888-9_47
Carmen López Ferrero, Irene Renau, Rogelio Nazar and Sergi Torner (2014) Computer-assisted Revision in Spanish Academic Texts: Peer-assessment. In 4th World Conference on Learning Teaching and Educational Leadership (WCLTA-2013). Link: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877042814035071
Anthony Penniston and Eric Harley (2014) Classification and Generation of Grammatical Errors. In Proceedings of the 2014 International C* Conference on Computer Science & Software Engineering. Link: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2641527
