FIRST 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 cur
r ent 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 Sha r ed 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 NL P 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


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 8 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. Papers which describe systems are also invited to give a demo of
their system.

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) ...".

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


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, Universit� 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
Aur�lien 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
Matt Post, Johns Hopkins University, USA
Patti Price, PPRICE Speech and Language Technology, USA
Marti Quixal, University of Texas at Austin, USA
Carolyn Ros�, 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
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