The 4th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications

NAACL-HLT 2009 Workshops


Workshop Description - Workshop Program - Submission Info - Important Dates - Program Committee - Related Links

Conference: NAACL-HLT 2009

Organization: Joel Tetreault (Educational Testing Service), Jill Burstein (Educational Testing Service), Claudia Leacock (Butler Hill Group)

Contact person: Joel Tetreault: JTetreaultets.org

Date : June 05, 2009

Venue : Boulder, CO, USA

Original CFP


Workshop Description

NLP-based applications in educational environments continue to develop at a fast pace. Initial work began as early as the 1960’s on evaluating written essay-length and short-answer assessments, text-based intelligent tutoring systems (ITS), and proofreading tools. These fields continue to progress using innovative NLP techniques – statistical, rule-based, or some combination of the two. More recently, new technologies have made it possible to include speech in both assessment and ITS. Using a somewhat different approach, NLP techniques are being used to generate assessments and tools for curriculum development. As a community we are not only improving existing capabilities, but identifying and generating innovative and creative ways to use NLP in applications for writing, reading, speaking, and critical thinking.

The need for, and the rapid development of, language-based capability development has been driven by increased requirements for state/national assessments and a growing population of foreign and second language learners. In the past ten 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.

The Innovative Use of NLP in Educational Applications workshops have continued to bring together all these subfields 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, ACL 2005 and ACL 2008) 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 techniques and tools in educational applications.

We are increasing the scope of this workshop to include the following:

Full paper and short paper topics will include, but will not be limited to the following:



Workshop Program

[ Download Proceedings ]

8:30 - 9:00 Loading in of Presentations
Speakers, please bring your presentations so we can preload them before the workshop
9:00 - 9:15 Opening Remarks
9:15 - 9:40 Automated assessment of spoken Modern Standard Arabic
Jian Cheng, Jared Bernstein, Ulrike Pado and Masanori Suzuki
[ paper ] [ slides ]
9:40 - 10:05 Automatic Scoring of Children's Read-Aloud Text Passages and Word Lists
Klaus Zechner, John Sabatini and Lei Chen
[ paper ] [ slides ]
10:05 - 10:30 Inferring Tutorial Dialogue Structure with Hidden Markov Modeling
Kristy Elizabeth Boyer, Eun Young Ha, Robert Phillips, Michael Wallis, Mladen Vouk and James Lester
[ paper ] [ slides ]
10:30 - 11:00 Break
11:00 - 11:25 A New Yardstick and Tool for Personalized Vocabulary Building
Thomas Landauer, Kirill Kireyev and Charles Panaccione
[ paper ] [ slides ]
11:25 - 11:50 Supporting the Adaptation of Texts for Poor Literacy Readers: a Text Simplification Editor for Brazilian Portuguese
Arnaldo Candido, Erick Maziero, Lucia Specia, Caroline Gasperin, Thiago Pardo and Sandra Aluisio
[ paper ] [ slides ]
11:50 - 12:15 An Application of Latent Semantic Analysis to Word Sense Discrimination for Words with Related and Unrelated Meanings
Juan Pino and Maxine Eskenazi
[ paper ] [ slides ]
12:15 - 2:15 Lunch
2:15 - 2:40 Automated Suggestions for Miscollocations
Anne Li-E Liu, David Wible and Nai-lung Tsao
[ paper ] [ slides ]
2:40 - 3:05 A Method for Unsupervised Broad-Coverage Lexical Error Detection and Correction
Nai-Lung Tsao and David Wible
[ paper ] [ slides ]
3:05 - 3:30 KSC-PaL: A Peer Learning Agent that Encourages Students to take the Initiative
Cynthia Kersey, Barbara Di Eugenio, Pamela Jordan and Sandra Katz
[ paper ] [ slides ]
3:30 - 4:00 Break
4:00 - 4:25 Using First and Second Language Models to Correct Preposition Errors in Second Language Authoring
Matthieu Hermet and Désilets Alain
[ paper ] [ slides ]
4:25 - 4:50 User Input and Interactions on Microsoft Research ESL Assistant
Claudia Leacock, Michael Gamon and Chris Brockett
[ paper ] [ slides ]
4:50 - 5:15 GenERRate: Generating Errors for Use in Grammatical Error Detection
Jennifer Foster and Oistein Andersen
[ paper ] [ slides ]
7:15 - Informal Post-Workshop Dinner at the Walnut Brewery on 1123 Walnut Street.
[ directions from UMC (Workshop location) to Walnut Brewery ]
all are invited



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). This year, we also invite short papers of up to 4 pages (including references). 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" in the START submission process.

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 2009 NAACL-HLT style sheet for composing your paper: http://clear.colorado.edu/NAACLHLT2009/stylefiles.html

We will be using the START conference system to manage submissions: https://www.softconf.com/naacl-hlt09/EducationNLP2009/

Important Dates

Program Committee

Related Links