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The 4th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications |
Conference: NAACL-HLT 2009
Organization: Joel Tetreault (Educational Testing Service), Jill Burstein (Educational Testing Service), Claudia Leacock (Butler Hill Group)
Contact person: Joel Tetreault: JTetreault
ets.org
Date : June 05, 2009
Venue : Boulder, CO, USA
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 plan to increase the scope of this workshop to include a demo and poster session, as well as planning for the first shared task of the workshop: grammatical error detection and correction of articles and prepositions for 2010. Full paper and demo and poster submission topics will include, but will not be limited to the following:
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 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. A link will be posted shortly.