The 3rd Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications

ACL 2008 Workshops


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

Workshop Program (includes individual papers and presentation slides)

Conference: ACL 2008

Organization: Joel Tetreault (Educational Testing Service), Jill Burstein (Educational Testing Service), Rachele De Felice (Oxford University)

Contact person: Joel Tetreault: JTetreaultets.org

Date : Thursday, June 19

Venue : Columbus, Ohio, USA

Original CFP


Post-Workshop Information

We would like to thank the authors, our program committee, and workshop attendees for helping put together the 3rd ACL-BEA Workshop. Final proceedings of the 3rd ACL-BEA Workshop can be downloaded here: [ proceedings ]. In addition, individual papers and slides can be downloaded from the Workshop Program section below. The papers can also be found in the 2008 Workshop section of the ACL anthology.

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.

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



Workshop Program (List of Accepted Papers)

8:45 - 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 Developing Online ICALL Resources for Russian
Markus Dickinson and Joshua Herring
[ paper ] [ slides ]
9:40 - 10:05 Classification Errors in a Domain-Independent Assessment System
Rodney D. Nielsen, Wayne Ward and James H. Martin
[ paper ] [ slides ]
10:05 - 10:30 King Alfred: A Translation Environment for Learners of Anglo-Saxon English
Lisa N. Michaud
[ paper ] [ slides ]
10:30 - 11:00 Break
11:00 - 11:20 Recognizing Noisy Romanized Japanese Words in Learner English
Ryo Nagata, Jun-ichi Kakegawa, Hiromi Sugimoto and Yukiko Yabuta
[ paper ] [ slides ]
11:20 - 11:40 An Annotated Corpus Outside Its Original Context: A Corpus-Based Exercise Book
Barbora Hladka and Ondrej Kucera
[ paper ] [ slides ]
11:40 - 12:00 Answering Learners' Questions by Retrieving Question Paraphrases from Social Q&A Sites
Delphine Bernhard and Iryna Gurevych
[ paper ] [ slides ]
12:00 - 12:20 Learner Characteristics and Feedback in Tutorial Dialogue
Kristy Boyer, Robert Phillips, Michael Wallis, Mladen Vouk and James Lester
[ paper ] [ slides ]
12:20 - 1:55 Lunch
1:55 - 2:20 Automatic Identification of Discourse Moves in Scientific Article Introductions
Nick Pendar and Elena Cotos
[ paper ] [ slides ]
2:20 - 2:45 An Analysis of Statistical Models and Features for Reading Difficulty Prediction
Michael Heilman, Kevyn Collins-Thompson and Maxine Eskenazi
[ paper ] [ slides ]
2:45 - 3:10 Retrieval of Reading Materials for Vocabulary and Reading Practice
Michael Heilman, Le Zhao, Juan Pino and Maxine Eskenazi
[ paper ] [ slides ]
3:10 - 3:30 Real Time Web Text Classification and Analysis of Reading Difficulty
Eleni Miltsakaki and Audrey Troutt
[ paper ] [ slides ]
3:30 - 4:00 Break
4:00 - 4:25 Towards Automatic Scoring of a Test of Spoken Language with Heterogeneous Task Types
Klaus Zechner and Xiaoming Xi
[ paper ] [ slides ]
4:25 - 4:50 Diagnosing Meaning Errors in Short Answers to Reading Comprehension Questions
Stacey Bailey and Detmar Meurers
[ paper ] [ slides ]
5:45 - Informal Post-Workshop Dinner (details during workshop)
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). 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

Program Committee

Related Links