[Corpora-List] FINAL CFP! - 9th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA9)

[Joel Tetreault]

(apologies in advance for cross-posting)


                           FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS

     The 9th Workshop on the Innovative Use of NLP for Building
                        Educational Applications (BEA9)

                   Baltimore, MD, USA; June 26, 2014
                            (co-located with ACL)

        http://www.cs.rochester.edu/~tetreaul/acl-bea9.html

                 *Submission Deadline: March 25, 2014*



WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

The field of NLP and education has dramatically matured since the first BEA
workshop in 1997 , where the primary focus was on grammatical error
detection. As a community, we have continued to improve existing
capabilities and to identify and develop innovative and creative NLP
approaches for use in educational settings. In the writing domain,
automated writing evaluation systems are now commercially viable, and are
used to score millions of test-taker essays on high-stakes assessments. In
speech, major advances in speech technology, have made it possible to
include speech in both assessment and Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS).
Spoken constructed responses are now being used in low-stakes and practice
applications. Consistent with this, there is also a renewed interest in
spoken dialog for instruction and assessment. Relative to continued
innovation, the explosive growth of mobile applications has increased
interest in 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 automated writing evaluation capabilities to expand
the analysis of written responses to writing genres other than those
presently found in standardized assessments. Much of the current demand for
creative, new educational applications stems from the development of the
Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI). CCSSI describes what K-12
students should be learning with regard to reading, writing, speaking,
listening, language, and media and technology. The goal of CCSSI is to
ensure college- and workplace-readiness across those domains.

In the past few years, the use of NLP in educational applications has
gained visibility outside of the computational linguistics (CL) community.
First, the Hewlett Foundation reached out to public and private sectors and
sponsored two competitions (both inspired by the CCSSI): one for automated
essay scoring, and the other for scoring of short response items. The
motivation driving these competitions was to engage the larger scientific
community in this enterprise. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are now
also beginning to incorporate automated writing evaluation systems to
manage the thousands of assignments that may be received during a single
MOOC course (New York Times). 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 2013. Also in 2013 there was a SemEval Shared Task on
Student Response Analysis and one on Native Language Identification (hosted
at the 2013 edition of this workshop). All of these competitions increased
the visibility of the research space for NLP for building educational
applications. While attendance has continued to be strong for several
years, 2013 was a banner year for the BEA workshop as it was the largest
ever and had the largest attendance count of any one-day workshop at NAACL.

The 2014 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 assessments; (2) delivery
of curriculum and assessments; and (3) reporting of assessment outcomes. In
the 2014 workshop, 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; grammatical error detection; learner
cognition; spoken dialog; 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 sytems or MOOCs would be of
special interest. Since the first workshop in 1997, the BEA workshop series
has continued to bring together many NLP subfields, and to foster
interaction and collaboration among researchers in academia and industry.
The workshop offers a unique venue for researchers to present and discuss
their work. Each year, we see steady growth in workshop submissions and
attendance, and the research has become more advanced. In 2014, we expect
that the workshop (consistent with the eight 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. Topics will include, but
will not be limited to, the following:

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


SPONSORS

We are pleased to announce that CTB
McGraw-Hill<http://www.ctb.com/ctb.com/control/main>
, edX <http://www.edx.org/>, Educational Testing Service<http://www.ets.org/>
, Lightside <http://lightsidelabs.com/> and
Pearson<http://www.pearson.com/> are
all gold level sponsors of the BEA9 workshop and American Institutes for
Research <http://www.air.org/> is a silver level sponsor! Sponsorship goes
toward subsidizing dinner for students attending the workshop, free
t-shirts with registration and the invited speaker.


INVITED SPEAKER

We are happy to have Dr. Norbert Elliot <http://norbertelliot.com/> as our
invited speaker for the BEA9!  Here is his bio:

Norbert Elliot is professor of English at New Jersey Institute of
Technology<http://www.njit.edu/>.
He has won both the Conference on College Composition and Communication
Outstanding Book Award and the IEEE Professional Communication Society
Rudolph J. Joenk Award for outstanding research published in IEEE
Transactions on Professional Communication. As advocate of AWE research,
Elliot is also co-author of Uses and Limitations of Automated Writing
Evaluation Software, a WPA-CompPile Research Bibliography (No. 23, December
2013). He has contributed to the Handbook of Automated Essay Evaluation:
Current Applications and New Directions.

As a writing studies researcher committed to wise use of automated writing
evaluation (AWE), his work focuses on two areas: promoting
multidisciplinary research and innovative applications. To promote
collaborative research, in 2013 he co-edited a special issue of Assessing
Writing. Focusing on issues ranging from placement to the evaluation of
second language writing, reported research included articles from the
fields of applied and theoretical linguistics, educational measurement,
psychometrics, and writing assessment. In his research on innovative AWE
use, Elliot has used the Criterion® Online Writing Evaluation Service at
NJIT as a way to rapidly assess the writing ability of admitted first-year
students as a way to decrease unwarranted remediation and increase course
success. Working with bioengineers and radiologists at NJIT, he is
currently working on an experiment to determine if there is a neurological
basis for modes of writing discourse.

SUBMISSION INFORMATION


We will be using the ACL 2014 Submission Guidelines for the BEA9 Workshop
this year. Authors are invited to submit a full paper of up to *9 pages* in
electronic, PDF format, with up to 2 additional pages for references. We
also invite short papers of up to *5 pages*, including 2 additional pages
for references. Please note that unlike previous years, final, *camera
ready* versions of accepted papers will *not* be given an additional page
to address reviewer comments.

Papers which describe systems are also invited to give a demo of their
system. If you would like to present a *demo* in addition to presenting the
paper, please make sure to select either "full paper + demo" or "short
paper + demo" under "Submission Category" in the START submission page.

Previously published papers cannot be accepted. The submissions will be
reviewed by three members of 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 2014 ACL style sheets for composing your paper:
http://www.cs.jhu.edu/ACL2014/CallforPapers.htm (see "ACL 2014 Style Files"
section).

We will be using the START conference system to manage submissions:
https://www.softconf.com/acl2014/BEA9


IMPORTANT DATES

* Submission Deadline: March 25 - 23:59 EST (New York City Time)*
Notification of Acceptance: April 11
Camera-ready papers Due: April 28
Workshop: June 26


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Joel Tetreault, Yahoo! Labs, USA
Jill Burstein, Educational Testing Service, USA
Claudia Leacock, CTB McGraw-Hill, USA


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Andrea Abel, EURAC, Italy
Oistein Andersen, University of Cambridge, UK
Sumit Basu, Microsoft Research, USA
Timo Baumann, University of Hamburg, Germany
Lee Becker, Hapara, USA
Delphine Bernhard, Université de Strasbourg, France
Jared Bernstein, Pearson, USA
Kristy Boyer, North Carolina State University, USA
Chris Brew, Nuance Communications, Inc., USA
Ted Briscoe, University of Cambridge, UK
Chris Brockett, Microsoft Research, USA
Julian Brooke, University of Toronto, USA
Aoife Cahill, Educational Testing Service, USA
Min Chi, North Carolina State University, USA
Martin Chodorow, Hunter College, CUNY, USA
Mark Core, University of Southern California, USA
Daniel Dahlmeier, SAP, Singapore
Barbara Di Eugenio, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
Markus Dickinson, Indiana University, USA
Bill Dolan, Microsoft Research, USA
Myrosia Dzikovska, University of Edinburgh, UK
Yo Ehara, Miyao Lab., National Institute of Informatics, Japan
Maxine Eskenazi, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Keelan Evanini, ETS, USA
Michael Flor, ETS, USA
Peter Foltz, Pearson Knowledge Technologies, USA
Jennifer Foster, Dublin City University, Ireland
Thomas Francois, UC Louvain, Belgium
Anette Frank, University of Heidelberg, Germany
Michael Gamon, Microsoft Research, USA
Caroline Gasperin, Swiftkey, UK
Kallirroi Georgila, University of Southern California
Iryna Gurevych, University of Darmstadt, Germany
Na-Rae Han, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Trude Heift, Simon Frasier University, Canada
Michael Heilman, ETS, USA
Derrick Higgins, ETS, USA
Radu Ionescu, University of Bucharest, Romania
Ross Israel, Indiana University, USA
Pamela Jordan, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Levi King, Indiana University, USA
Ola Knutsson, Stockholm University, Sweden
Ekaterina Kochmar, University of Cambridge, UK
Mamoru Komachi, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Japan
John Lee, City University of Hong Kong
Baoli Li, Henan University of Technology, China
Diane Litman, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Annie Louis, University of Edinburgh, UK
Xiaofei Lu, Penn State University, USA
Nitin Madnani, ETS, USA
Montse Maritxalar, University of the Basque Country, Spain
James Martin, University of Colorado, USA
Aurélien Max, LIMSI-CNRS, France
Julie Medero, University of Washington, USA
Detmar Meurers, University of Tubingen, Germany
Lisa Michaud, Merrimack College, USA
Rada Mihalcea, University of Michigan, USA
Michael Mohler, Language Computer Corporation, USA
Jack Mostow, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Smaranda Muresan, Columbia University, USA
Ani Nenkova, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Hwee Tou Ng, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Rodney Nielsen, University of Colorado, USA
Mari Ostendorf, University of Washington, USA
Ted Pedersen, University of Minnesota, USA
Heather Pon-Barry, Arizona State University, USA
Matt Post, Johns Hopkins University, USA
Patti Price, PPRICE Speech and Language Technology, USA
Marti Quixal, University of Texas at Austin, USA
Carolyn Rosé, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Andrew Rosenberg, Queens College, CUNY, USA
Mihai Rotaru, TextKernel, the Netherlands
Alla Rozovskaya, Columbia University, USA
Keisuku Sakaguchi, Johns Hopkins University, USA
Mathias Schulze, University of Waterloo, Canada
Serge Sharoff, University of Leeds, UK
Richard Sproat, Google, USA
Svetlana Stenchikova, AT&T Services, Advanced Technologies, Inc., USA
Helmer Strik, Radboug University Nijmegen, the Netherlands
Nai-Lung Tsao, National Central University, Taiwan
Lucy Vanderwende, Microsoft Research, USA
Giulia Venturi, Institute of Computational Linguistics "Antonio Zampolli"
(ILC-CNR), Italy
Carl Vogel, Trinity College, Ireland
Elena Volodina, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Monica Ward, Dublin City University, Ireland
Pete Whitelock, Oxford University Press, UK
Magdalena Wolska, University of Tubingen, Germany
Peter Wood, University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada
Wenting Xiong, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Helen Yannakoudakis, University of Cambridge, UK
Marcos Zampieri, Saarland University, Germany
Klaus Zechner, ETS, USA
Torsten Zesch, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
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