Hi all, hope you are having a nice start to the new year. The 8th BEA newsletter contains the following:
BEA10 Announcements
Upcoming EduNLP Conferences
Job Opening (from Hwee Tou Ng)
Recent EduNLP publications
Resources
I'd like to thank our BEA Newsletter volunteers: Ekaterina Kochmar, Ildiko Pilan, Somwya V. B. and Helen Yannakoudakis for once again massively assisting in the writing of this newsletter. Thanks!
As always, if you know of any corpora, resources, tools, pubs, conferences, job postings, etc. that would be good to have on the newsletter, please let us know and they'll go in the next one.
Finally, at the NLP4CALL Workshop this past month, they put out a survey to get a handle on the research interests and goals people had for the field. If you have a moment, please fill it out: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1tQbHBgZoOG-N88yUt4mIoZ7YJUplbm5HO7ignDrajzM/viewform?usp=send_form
Joel & BEA Friends
1. BEA10 Announcements
We're getting excited for the 10th edition of the BEA! We are one of only a handful of workshops in the *CL universe that have made it to a tenth edition which is a wonderful achievement. To add to it, we had a record number of submissions to BEA10, and the workshop is looking like it might be one of the largest in its history. We're looking forward to seeing you in Denver on Thursday, June 04. Some notes for people attending and presenting:
* You can find the workshop schedule (and thus list of accepted papers) here:http://www.cs.rochester.edu/~tetreaul/naacl-bea10.html#program
* We will be having our world-famous post-workshop dinner following the workshop that night. Please consider sticking around Denver another day to attend!
* For presenters, we will be following the NAACL2015 instructions, so please check them out. The only differences are that 1) short paper oral presentations get 20min (15min content, 5min Q/A), and 2) the presentations will not be video'd. Instructions here:http://naacl.org/naacl-hlt-2015/presentation-instructions.html
* We are fortunate to have many sponsors this year. This goes towards our free workshop t-shirt (free with registration) and defrays the cost of dinner for students. The gold level sponsors are Appen, McGraw-Hill Education/CTB, Educational Testing Service, Grammarly, Turnitin Lightside Labs, Pacific Metrics and Pearson. And American Institutes for Research is a silver level sponsor!
* Yes we have a whole new design for the BEA T-shirts. You will get a shirt when you go up to register. Go early to get the size you want!
2. Upcoming EduNLP Conferences and Workshops
There are several EduNLP events in 2015! We've broken things into ones where the deadlines have passed but the event is still upcoming, and those in which the deadlines are still open.
A. Open Deadlines (sorted by Conference Deadline)
* Workshop on Arabic Natural Language Processing (WANLP 2015):
Including a Shared Task on Automatic Arabic Error Correction
(paper submission deadline: May 14; date: July 30, location: Beijing, China)
* SLaTE Workshop on L1 Teaching, Learning and Technology: https://sites.google.com/site/l1teachingandtechnology/
(deadline extension: **May 25**, dates: September 03; location: Leipzig, Germany)
* 6th Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT)
(deadline: June 08; date: September 11; location: Dresden, Germany )
* Workshop on Vision and Language Integration 2015 (VL'15):
(submission deadline: June 28; dates: September 18-19; location: Lisbon, Portugal)
B. Passed Deadlines (Sorted by Conference date)
* 4th Workshop on NLP for Computer-Assisted Language Learning (NLP4CALL)
(deadline: March 26; date: May 11; location: Vilnius, Lithuania)
* Workshop on NLP for Informal Text (NLPIT 2015):
(submission deadline: April 17; date: June 23; location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands)
* Chinese Grammatical Error Diagnosis (CGED):
(registration deadline: Apr 01; date: July 31; Beijing, China)
* 2nd Workshop on NLP Techniques for Educational Applications (NLP-TEA-2):
(deadline: May 07; date: July 31; Beijing, China)
* Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT)
(submission deadline: May 07; date: July 31; location: Beijing)
* Conference of the European Association for Computer-Assisted Language Learning (EUROCALL)
(abstract deadline: February 15; submission deadline: June 30; dates: August 26-29; location: Padova, Italy)
* Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP)
(abstract deadline: April 27; paper deadline: May 04; dates: September 5-11, location: Hissar, Bulgaria)
3. JOB ADVERT
The NUS Natural Language Processing Group is looking for suitable candidates to fill the following research positions:
1. Research Fellows
The initial appointment is for a period of one year, with possible extension subject to research funding availability. The candidates will join at the rank of Research Fellow, at a starting monthly salary of around S$5,500, depending on qualifications and experience. Candidates with expertise in one of the following areas are encouraged to apply:
(a) Grammatical error correction: Detection and correction of grammatical errors of second language learners of English.
(b) Statistical machine translation: Translation of human languages, with focus on translation between Chinese and English.
A candidate should have a PhD in computer science specializing in natural language processing or a related discipline, with prior research experience and publications, preferably in the focus area of research. Strong programming skills and good command of English (both spoken and written) are required. Expertise in machine learning is valuable.
2. Research Assistants
Multiple positions are available in the research areas of grammatical error correction and statistical machine translation. The initial appointment is for a period of one year, with possible extension subject to research funding availability. The candidates will join at the rank of Research Assistant, at a starting monthly salary of around S$3,400, depending on qualifications and experience. A candidate should possess a good honors degree or equivalent in computer science or a related discipline. Strong programming skills and good command of English (both spoken and written) are required. Candidates interested in pursuing research leading to a PhD degree in computer science at NUS with specialization in natural language processing are preferred.
Interested candidates for the above positions please apply with a cover letter, CV, academic transcripts, names and email addresses of 3 referees. Please email the application materials to: Professor Hwee Tou Ng (Email: nght AT comp DOT nus DOT edu DOT sg).
Professor Hwee Tou Ng
Department of Computer Science
National University of Singapore
Home Page: http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~nght
4. Recent Publications in EduNLP
Journals and Tech Reports (found via Google Scholar):
Designing a Reading Material Recommendation System for EFL Learners
Chin-Hwa Kuo and Chen-Chung Chi
Journal of Applied Science and Engineering, Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 371-382 (2014)
Evaluation Methods for Intelligent Tutoring Systems Revisited
Jim Greer, Mary Mark
International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, April 2015
Analyzing and Comparing Reading Stimulus Materials Across the TOEFL® Family of Assessments
Jing Chen andKathleen M. Sheehan
ETS Research Report Series
Different topics, different discourse: Relationships among writing topic, measures of syntactic complexity, and judgments of writing quality
Weiwei Yang, Xiaofei Lu, Sara Cushing Weigle
Journal of Second Language Writing, Vol 28, 2015.
An Investigation of Native and Nonnative English Speakers' Levels of Written Syntactic Complexity in Asynchronous Online Discussions
Rae L. Mancilla, Nihat Polat and Ahmet O. Akcay
Applied Linguistics (2015)
NAACL 2015:
Lisa Beinborn, Torsten Zesch and Iryna Gurevych. "Predicting the Difficulty of Language Proficiency Tests"
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, vol. 2, pp. 517–529
Mariano Felice and Ted Briscoe. "Towards a standard evaluation method for grammatical error detection and correction"
In Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT 2015)
William Hwang, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Mari Ostendorf and Wei Wu. "Aligning Sentences from Standard Wikipedia to Simple Wikipedia"
In Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT 2015)
Xiaolong Li and Kristy Boyer. "Semantic Grounding in Dialogue for Complex Problem Solving"
In Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT 2015)
Shervin Malmasi and Mark Dras. "Large-Scale Native Language Identification with Cross-Corpus Evaluation"
In Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT 2015)
To appear
Yugo Murawaki. "Continuous Space Representations of Linguistic Typology and their Application to Phylogenetic Inference"
In Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT 2015)
To appear
Alla Rozovskaya and Dan Roth. "Building a State-of-the-Art Grammatical Error Correction System"
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2 (2014) pp. 419–434
Keisuke Sakaguchi, Michael Heilman and Nitin Madnani. "Effective Feature Integration for Automated Short Answer Scoring"
In Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT 2015)
To appear
Alessandro Sordoni, Michel Galley, Michael Auli, Chris Brockett, Yangfeng Ji, Margaret Mitchell, Jian-Yun Nie, Jianfeng Gao, Bill Dolan. "A Neural Network Approach to Context-Sensitive Generation of Conversational Responses"
In Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT 2015)
To appear
Yulia Tsvetkov, Waleed Ammar, Chris Dyer. "Constraint-Based Models of Lexical Borrowing"
In Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT 2015)
ACL 2015
Vinay Shashidhar, Nishant Pandey and Varun Aggarwal. Automatic Spontaneous Speech Grading: A Novel Feature Derivation Technique Using the Crowd.
Christopher Bryant and Hwee Tou Ng. How Far Are We from Fully Automatic High Quality Grammatical Error Correction?
Isaac Persing and Vincent Ng. Modeling Argument Strength in Student Essays.
Shuangzhi Wu, Dongdong Zhang, Ming Zhou and Tiejun Zhao. Efficient Disfluency Detection with Transition-Based Parsing.
Yun-Nung Chen, William Yang Wang, Anatole Gershman and Alexander Rudnicky. Matrix Factorization with Knowledge Graph Propagation for Unsupervised Spoken Language Understanding.
Zhendong Zhao, Lan Du, Benjamin Börschinger, John K Pate and Mark Johnson. A Computationally Efficient Algorithm for Learning Topical Collocation Models.
Antoine Bride, Tim Van de Cruys and Nicholas Asher. A Generalisation of Lexical Functions for Composition in Distributional Semantics.
Ellie Pavlick, Johan Bos, Malvina Nissim, Charley Beller, Benjamin Van Durme and Chris Callison-Burch. Adding Semantics to Data-Driven Paraphrasing.
Yvette Graham. Improving Evaluation of Machine Translation Quality Estimation.
Mrinmaya Sachan, Kumar Dubey, Matthew Richardson and Eric Xing. Learning Answer-Entailing Structures for Machine Comprehension.
Asad Sayeed, Stefan Fischer and Vera Demberg. Vector-Space Calculation of Semantic Surprisal for Predicting Word Pronunciation Duration.
Jon Stevens, Anton Benz, Sebastian Reusse and Ralf Klabunde. A Strategic Reasoning Model for Generating Alternative Answers.
Martin Gleize and Brigitte Grau. A Unified Kernel Approach for Learning Typed Sentence Rewritings.
CICLing 2015:
Nisioi, S. Feature Analysis for Native Language Identification.
Derici, C., Çelik, K., Kutbay, E., Aydın, Y., Güngör, T., Özgür, A., & Kartal, G. Question Analysis for a Closed Domain Question Answering System.
Ildikó Pilán, Sowmya Vajjala and Elena Volodina. A Readable Read: Automatic Assessment of Language Learning Materials based on Linguistic Complexity.
Claudia Martinez, Alejandra Segura, Chistian Vidal-Castro, Jorge Fernandez and Clemente Rubio. What do our children read about? Affect analysis of school texts in Chile.
NLP4CALL Workshop (May 11, 2015, Vilnius, Lithuania)
Link to the workshop proceedings: http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp_home/index.en.aspx?issue=114
Also:
The workshop organizers prepared also a small pre-workshop survey that anyone interested in ICALL is welcome to fill in before or after the event:
List of papers (it could also be enough to keep only the link to the proceedings, in case there would be too many entries in the newsletter)
Heike Da Silva Cardoso and Magdalena Wolska. Misspellings in Responses to Listening Comprehension Questions and Their Phonetic Normalization to Account for Teachers' Scores.
Peter Juel Henrichsen. Taking the Danish Speech Trainer from CALL to ICALL.
Andrea Horbach, Jonathan Poitz and Alexis Palmer. Using Shallow Syntactic Features to Measure Influences of L1 and Proficiency Level in EFL Writings.
Andrey Kutuzov and Elizaveta Kuzmenko. Semi-automated typical error annotation for learner English essays: integrating frameworks.
Ulrike Pado and Cornelia Kiefer. Short Answer Grading: When Sorting Helps and When it Doesn't.
Heli Uibo, Jaak Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, Jack Rueter and Sulev Iva. Oahpa! Õpi! Opiq! Developing free online programs for learning Estonian and Võro.
5. Resources
A Python implementation of the I-measure, a metric used for evaluating grammatical error correction systems, presented in Mariano Felice and Ted Briscoe. "Towards a standard evaluation method for grammatical error detection and correction"
