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FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS

ACL 2008 Workshop on

Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications
Columbus, Ohio; June 19/20, 2008

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

Submission Deadline: March 14, 2008

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WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

NLP-based applications have had a profound effect on education in the areas of
assessment and instruction. Early applications focused on writing for automated
essay scoring, short-answer response scoring in assessment and intelligent
tutoring, and grammatical error detection for proofreading. More recently, NLP
has been introduced into additional educational contexts, including automated
scoring of speech and text-based curriculum development for reading support. In
addition, the earlier applications for grammatical error detection have
greatly improved. Not only has the field improved existing capabilities, but as
a community we are generating innovative and creative ways to use NLP in
applications for multiple skill sets, including writing, reading, and speaking.

The need for, and the rapid development of, language-based capability
development in the United States and other Anglophone countries are driven by
increased requirements for state/national assessments and a growing population
of English language learners. In the past five years, steady growth in the area
of NLP-based applications for education has prompted an increased number of
workshops which typically focus on one specific aspect of NLP-based educational
applications. In this workshop, we solicit papers from all subfields.

We intend to bring all subfields together to foster continued interaction and
collaboration among researchers in both academic institutions and industry.
This workshop (consistent with previous workshops at ACL 1997, NAACL/HLT 2003,
and ACL 2005) will continue to expose the NLP research community to these
technologies with the hope that they continue to identify novel opportunities
for the use of NLP tools in educational applications.


TOPICS OF INTEREST

For this workshop, we invite submissions including, but not limited to:

1) Automated Scoring/Evaluation for Text and Speech
* Automated processing of spoken and written lecture materials across
genres, e.g., - Content-based analysis - Grammatical error detection -
Response-based discourse analysis - Stylistic analysis
* Knowledge representation in learning systems
* Machine translation for assessment, instruction, and curriculum development
* Plagiarism detection tools

2) Intelligent Tutoring
* Intelligent tutoring systems that incorporate state-of-the-art NLP methods
to evaluate response content, using either text- or speech-based analyses
* Dialogue systems in education
* Hypothesis formation and testing in automated tutoring systems
* Multi-modal communication between human learners and machines
* Automatically generating tutorial responses

3) Learner Cognition
* Automated assessment of students' language and cognitive skill levels
* Automated systems that detect and adapt to learners' cognitive or
emotional states
* Automatic generation of test questions
* Tools for learners with special needs


4) Corpora and annotation standards for building NLP educational tools

5) Use of Response Databases
* Data mining of student corpora for tool building
* Visualization of concepts in learning systems

6) Classroom Tools
* NLP tools for second language learners
* Semantic-based access to instructional materials
* Tools for teachers and test developers (such as tools that automatically
identify text on a given topic, or adapt a text to the grade level of the
student, or assist in text-based curriculum development)
* E-learning tools for personalized course content

7) Evaluation of NLP-based tools for education

8) Descriptions of Working Systems


SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Authors are invited to submit a full paper of up to 8 pages in electronic, PDF
format (with up to 1 additional page for references). 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 ACL style sheet for composing your paper:
http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/acl08/stylefiles.html


And the following submission page handled by the START conference
system:
https://www.softconf.com/acl08/ACL08-WS10/


IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline: March 14, 2008
Notification of acceptance: April 07, 2008
Final papers due: April 21, 2008
Workshop: either June 19 or 20, 2008



WORKSHOP CHAIRS

Joel Tetreault, ETS, USA (principal contact: JTetreault@ets.org)
Jill Burstein, ETS, USA
Rachele De Felice, Oxford University, UK



PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Martin Chodorow, Hunter College, CUNY, USA
Mark Core, ICT/USC, USA
Bill Dolan, Microsoft, USA
Jennifer Foster, Dublin City University, Ireland
Michael Gamon, Microsoft, USA
Na-Rae Han, Korea University, Korea
Derrick Higgins, ETS, USA
Emi Izumi, NICT, Japan
Ola Knutsson, KTH Nada, Sweden
Claudia Leacock, Butler Hill Group, USA
John Lee, MIT, USA
Kathy McCoy, University of Delaware, USA
Detmar Meurers, OSU, USA
Lisa Michaud, Wheaton College, USA
Mari Ostendorf, University of Washington, USA
Stephen Pulman, Oxford, UK
Mathias Schulze, University of Waterloo, Canada
Stephanie Seneff, MIT, USA
Richard Sproat, UIUC, USA
Jana Sukkarieh, ETS, USA